1989
“Girls. Five more minutes and we’ll call it summer,” Carrie says, insisting we finish a novel that’s an imitation of The Catcher in the Rye except the main character isn’t at all sexy like Holden Caulfield. Who writes this shit?
“Wait, what?” Henrie says, staring intensely at the pages in front of her before looking up. “Finny dies?”
“Yes, he’s dead, dummy. The whole thing is homoerotic and Finny loves George—”
“Gene,” Carrie corrects me.
“Fine. Gene. Why can’t anyone write what they really mean? If Gene and Phineas love each other and that’s what that dumb book is about, why didn’t the author just say so?”
Carrie’s smile is pulling up the left side of her mouth. She thinks I’m clever. A stranger could tell. She wears her feelings slapped up on her face—angry, happy, sad, lonely. Lonely. Lonely. Lonely.
“It’s up for debate, actually,” Carrie says. “Many people don’t think it is about sexual love at all.”
Carrie’s got these freckles across the bridge of her nose sprinkled there like cinnamon. People say she looks like my mother, but I don’t see it. My mother was wild and islandy, her skin clear of blemishes. And she was full of mischief, like me. Not that I remember any of that myself, but Ms. Sonia has shown me pictures and Dad loves to tell stories about her.
Carrie homeschools Henrie and me through the winter along with a gaggle of other kids whose parents refuse to leave the island even in the grimmest of months. The other kids aren’t interesting, except maybe for Wilderness, whom we also call Wilde, as in Will D. He’s so tall already. It’s made him shy, and he never wants to make eye contact with me, which makes it more fun to try.
Winter is horrible here. The island transforms into a hunk of rock and ice, then sits so angry and scrunched up that the sun doesn’t even want to try to get to us. It’s like Alcatraz, not that I’ve ever seen it or anything besides this island and the Ohio mainland. Daddy wants to raise me and Henrie without the “interference or the influence of the greater world.” No television (except when we sneak to Ms. Sonia’s) and few trips to the mainland. “The world will have plenty of time to tell you what’s wrong with you when you go to college. For now, we are heathens and heretics and harbingers.” Harbingers of what? I might ask, and he will answer: “Of heathens and heretics, of course.”
“I don’t know what homo-rotic is,” Henrie says.
“It means those two boys want to knock boots. Do each other up and down. Fuck.”
“Beatrice,” Carrie says.
There aren’t a lot of other die-hard families on Fowler. Wilde’s father is the island sheriff. They moved here when Wilde was a baby. His mother died of cancer or something, so we have the dead-mother thing in common. Then there’s the Albertsons, whose son is just now eight. Frank and Rita, whose daughter is Henrie’s age, although hardly friend material since she hates being touched and doesn’t make eye contact. The Cunningham twins are ten and the Clarks, who have seven kids between them, ranging from five to ten, all of them stupid and boring. Then there is us. Henrietta, who will be fourteen in July, and I’m the eldest and most gorgeous at sixteen going on twenty-five.
I got my boobs last fall and my period this winter. Bled like mad for a week. Carrie tried to mother me with chicken soup. I said, “I don’t have the goddamn flu. Get me some meds!” We don’t believe in pharmaceuticals around here. Only natural solutions, which I call “the Herbs” and I pronounce Herbs like it’s some dude’s name. It gets on Carrie’s nerves something awful, but I don’t care, ’cause who doesn’t have a bottle of fucking Tylenol? Tell me that.
Anyhow, I am a woman now and people can’t take their eyes off me. I walk around kicking my hips out and letting my breasts bounce. I’m strong. Unstoppable. I cool it around Dad though. It makes him uncomfortable. Nowadays, if Henrie and I are asking him a question, he looks at her the whole time and only glances at me if I force a burp or a fart. That still gets him laughing.
“Can we be done?” I put my hands under my chin in mock prayer, kneeling when I catch a glimpse of Carrie’s entertained smile. “I’ll pick you berries. I’ll scoop the litter. Eat Dad’s chipped beef.”
“There is nothing wrong with your father’s chipped beef. And you know that we don’t have a cat. One of these days, Beatrice Bethany, one of these days, your big talking is gonna get you in trouble.”
“I hope so.” I wiggle my eyebrows at Carrie.
This family has a history of mamas too young to be mamas. Carrie is one of them—she had Henrie when she was nineteen—same as my mama. My mama was too young to die, as well, but she did both birth and death with a flagrance that calls for admiration—not that my father will ever talk about it, which is absurd since having a dead mother is pretty much the worst and most interesting thing that could ever happen to you. “Island women do things early and on their own,” our father says, sometimes with pride and always with great sadness.
Carrie is not an island woman. She’s always wincing and checking over her shoulder. She thinks I don’t know about her and Ms. Sonia—I’m pretty sure they’ve got a thing going on. They’ve been friends forever, but recently she’s always stammering and blushing anytime Ms. Sonia comes up. Even Daddy has noticed. No one gives a fuck. Carrie should just do what she wants like a real island woman, but instead, she seems even more timid, like she’s either sneaking up on something or trying to sneak away. It’s so damn easy to startle her. I swear, if you walk around expecting to be snuck up on, something is gonna sink its teeth right into your bones.
“I heard a ferry come in first thing this morning. Maybe your Joshua was on there,” Carrie says to Henrie.
“Mom!” she protests.
We met Joshua on island last summer. He and I are closer in age, but he’s got no edge to him. Superboring. Henrie can be a little like that too. She’s only adventurous ’cause I’m teaching her to be. Come to think of it, I don’t think she’s noticed how her mom and Ms. Sonia flirt.
“So, can we go?” My voice is no longer impatient. I’m good at knowing when I’ve won.
“Yes. Go. Be free. School’s out for summer. Watch out for tourists.”
“We love you, love you, love you,” I announce for both us girls.
Summer people and tourists are two entirely different groups of people. Islanders (that’s us) don’t officially care for either group, but if push comes to shove, we like summer people better. They own property on the island and so care, at least a little, about what happens to this rock. Tourists buy T-shirts and ice cream and pay to see Ms. Sonia’s Island Museum and tour the old dock of fishing boats. They keep us islanders afloat, but we hate them. They drink too much, leave their garbage strewn all over the beach, and make way too much noise. They carve their names into trees and take pictures of us as if we are part of the landscape.
Daddy has no time for anyone except for Henrie and me. Less me than Henrie but still. He used to have time for Carrie, but now they barely speak to each other. It’s not ’cause of whatever she’s got going with Ms. Sonia. Daddy flirts plenty, or at least he used to. Summer people love him, and there was that whole month he went and lived in that yurt with Courtney, or whatever her dumb name was. He’s not a jealous person. It’s more like he’s scared Carrie is gonna jump off the damn quarry cliff. Which I guess makes sense. That’s how my mother left us. We say she’s dead, but we don’t have proof unless you count that Henrie can talk to the dead. She’s heard ’em in the house her whole life, and she keeps me informed about what they say, especially the one we think is my mama.
“Where do we go first?” Henrie asks me.
“Where do you think?”
Henrie follows me to the sweeping front porch. We launch down the porch steps, past the tire swing into the road. I raise my arms out to my sides to show my wingspan and soar.
“Good morning, Ms. Penelope, you old whore.” I place my fingers in the stone palm of Ms. Penelope Fowler’s angel monument. One of her fingers is missing.
“Beautiful summer ahead, Dr. Archibald,” Henrie says to a flat gravestone. She taps it with her bare toes.
Henrie says that touch is as important in death as it is in life. “They may not be able to feel our skin on theirs, but they can feel that we are making an effort.” Henrie’s heart is so much bigger than mine. It’s ’cause of her that we visit each grave at the beginning of the summer, as if the dead can get lonely. Even though Henrie is the baby sister, she watches out for me. She understands that I am motherless and that such a tragedy means I’m gonna be fucked-up for life. The little rituals she creates for us are all for me, so that I don’t have to feel so sad all by myself.
“We’d stay longer but it’s Memorial Day and you know our ritual, Harold. Olivia Rose comes first.” Henrie bends to press her palm flat to the long-neglected grass of Harold’s cemetery plot. “We’ll be back soon.”
This is a Volt/Fowler family cemetery—the only graveyard allowed on the island—and there are 105 graves but only 95 bodies. The other 10 graves hold nothing but pretty satin-lined caskets filled with limestone. The women disappear, mostly tourists, but sometimes Fowlers and a Volt, leaving only their trinkets on the quarry cliff above the Killing Pond, and then we must “bury” them anyway, plucking up body-size rocks in place of a corpse. My mom is one of those. A disappeared islander. Daddy said he knew what the island had done as soon as he found me floating in the quarry pond. I was just a baby, but I was an island baby: “Strong and born knowing how to swim.” He’d say, “Your mother was swallowed up like all the rest.” He was so mad. Rumor is he pulled me out of the pond only to leave. He got on the next ferry. Left me and the island and went to NYC for a whole year. Ms. Sonia says that’s not true. She says he was here, hiding in his office until she showed up. He didn’t leave for New York until sometime after, but I say it hardly matters. He left me when my mom left, and he never quite came back.
My mother’s is the most recent bodiless grave. There is space next to her for Daddy when he goes, and a bit more space for me, so when we all die, vanished or not, we can make sure there’s a place for the living to visit. Henrie wasn’t even a sparkle in Daddy’s eye when he reserved these spots, and he always adds, “Seeing as how you and your sister are practically twins, we can just bunk you up. Two peas in a pod.” I don’t know if that’s allowed in real life, but it’s too sad to think of us being separated so we don’t ask more questions. No one, not even Carrie, brings up the lack of space for Carrie. It is on the list of things Henrie and I call “Items Not to Be Discussed upon Pain of Torturous Death and Suffering.” Carrie’s having no family plot is item ninety-eight.
“Come on!” I holler. I’m at the gleamy tombstone that is my mother’s. It is the only piece of new stone in the place, and sun glints off it, bouncing diamonds of light onto my skin. The ritual goes like this: Henrie slithers up, top of her head to the gravestone, and lays her body out over where my mom’s body should be. It’s an invitation, a gift. If my mom wanted to rise up, pour herself into a new body, she could have Henrie’s. It’s an absurd game. Mom’s body isn’t even down there, and Henrie knows more than anyone that Mom’s ghost is in the house with the others. Still, we do the ritual every year, and I love Henrie for thinking it might make a difference. She lets her feet relax outward and places her palms over her heart. I spread her hair out in the grass, and she looks almost as beautiful as my mother would if she were down there.
“Hold still.”
“I am still,” Henrie says even though I can see on her face that she knows she’s wiggling.
“Mother Olivia”—I always start with this—“we give you this vessel as an offer of strength and light and peace. Summer is here and the worms are squirming. Island waters are warming. We ask that you pour yourself into our bones to give us the strength to run and jump and swim and dive. Now we each have a specific summer wish. Is yours ready, Henrie?”
“Yes. I wish that Joshua Kevin Wilson spends the whole summer on island so we can fall madly in love and take a blood oath that our souls will never, ever be separated. My second wish is that my stupid body starts to look more like a girl body and less like something that should have a penis attached to it.”
I shut my eyes and pretend to listen intently for my mother’s response. “Granted.”
I think I will wish for what I always do, or some version of it anyway: My summer wish is that we sleep outdoors more than we sleep indoors and that we swim until our skin pickles and that we meet three new people who change our lives. Instead, I say, “I wish that we leave the island.”
“What?” Henrie props herself up on her elbows. She squints at me. I imagine I look like Ms. Penelope’s stone angel. “You mean like to Cleveland for supplies or whatever?”
“No, like we get to travel. To a different state. To real water. Like the ocean.”
“But it’s summer.” Henrie tries to fathom what I could possibly mean by this change.
She’s right. Summer on Fowler is full. We love it. If there was ever a time to run, it would be winter, but this spring is different. I can see it on Carrie. Even Daddy seems to be hiding from something.
“I’ve been thinking about it lately. Don’t you want to travel? See California? Or how about Scotland? Paris?”
“We’d need passports.” Henrie wrinkles her nose and looks toward town as if trying to figure out where we could possibly get them.
“I’m not suggesting we buy airplane tickets right this minute. I’m just saying that at some point we will want to get off this island, right? Why not start this summer? And, what if we could take our family with us?”
“But we don’t leave Fowler. We don’t want to.”
“Forget it. I didn’t mean it. Now lie back down.” I see that I’ve messed with her world. My stomach is suddenly tight. How could I ever leave this island? If we did leave, we’d have to take everyone with us. Daddy. Carrie. Sonia. My mother. It isn’t possible.
Henrie does as she’s told, and the ritual quickly becomes familiar again. “We love you, Mother Olivia, and we promise to take every moment of summer and live it to its fullest.” Daddy bought me a pocketknife last summer, so I take it out of my pocket, then take my sister’s hand. I make a small slice in the pad of her thumb, then one in my own. We mash them together. I put a red print on her forehead and another on mine.
“Island women forever,” we say in unison.
Before the slight breeze even begins to cool the feel of the blood on my forehead, Henrie shouts, “Come on! Our bell tower awaits.”
Ms. Sonia runs the Island Museum, which sits at the edge of our cemetery. She’s a second mother to us, or, in my case, a third, and she lives in the old island church that Elizabeth and Eileen Fowler built before Seth Volt ruined everything. The modest limestone building is two stories, although the second floor is only a loft, which Ms. Sonia has turned into her apartment. We aren’t allowed up there unless we are watching movies. The bell tower is made of wood and painted bright white, stretching up higher than the rest of the building.
“I’m gonna beat you!” Henrie hollers back at me as she begins to run. She’s fast, a tiny little body with no fat, but her legs are short, so I know I can catch her if I want to. I don’t plan to pass her, but once my legs get moving, it feels so good that I push harder. My body flies forward.
I take Ms. Sonia’s stone steps two at a time and smack my flat palm to the arched wood doors first.
“Winner, winner!” I shout.
“You are so fast.” Henrie is proud of me. She’s always rooting for someone else, never seeming to notice when I miss my moment to be kind or modest.
“Morning, girls!”
The voice comes from behind us, and we both shriek.
Ms. Sonia’s got on her jogging clothes, a gray sweatband in her black hair even though her hair is short and spikes up around her face.
“Did my ten.” She’s not out of breath, so she’s either lying or had her cooldown already. I know she’s not lying. She runs the periphery of the island early in the morning and likes to say, “Someone has to check to make sure no one broke in last night,” as if the island is a house to be robbed. She always pauses dramatically, then adds, “Or broke out.” Most of the time it seems like the kind of tired joke adults make to kids, but sometimes she says it and sounds freaked out. Dad says she’s the latest Island Curator—Eileen Fowler being the first.
“It’s summer!” Henrie announces.
“Well, technically, it’s still spring,” Ms. Sonia corrects. “Summer isn’t here until late June.”
“Summer!” Henrie shouts back in defiance.
“We’ve told you this before,” I say. “The arrival of summer is not calendar dependent. It is based on the weather and our feelings.”
“Fair enough.” Ms. Sonia stretches her calves on the stairs. “B.B., you look older. Like a woman suddenly. Did you look like that last week?”
I feel myself glow with the compliment.
Henrie answers for me, “She did. The tank top just shows off her boobies. I think she should wear a bra. My mom gave her a bunch.”
Ms. Sonia sends a little spray of spit out into the sunshine, taken off guard by her own laugh.
“I look exactly the same.” Henrie looks down at her flat chest and her belly, which still sticks out like a toddler’s.
Ms. Sonia stops stretching and takes the steps slowly but two at a time. She kisses Henrie on the top of her head. “You are perfect just as you are.”
Ms. Sonia whispers something I can’t hear in Henrie’s ear, and I feel a flush of jealousy rising to my face.
Done with her whispering, Ms. Sonia throws open the church doors. The old wooden floor inside is beautiful. Fully refinished by Ms. Sonia, and you can still see where each church pew used to bolt into the floor. Little dark spots in the otherwise blond wood that prove this island was working at things long before I came along.
She rushes to her desk, where she retrieves two sets of earplugs and a skeleton key.
“Fit them in tight!” She hands us the earplugs. Henrie loves the squish of the purple foam and obediently starts rolling them between her fingers so they’ll fit tightly into her ears. “B.B.”—Ms. Sonia drags out my name—“you don’t want to end up like my grandfather, deaf in the left and lazy in the right. We had to yell the simplest of statements at him. It was always ‘Granddad! Your fly is down!’ ‘Granddad! Don’t eat that!’”
“Maybe he was just ignoring you.” I say it low and try to keep the words mostly at the back of my throat. I look at Ms. Sonia to see if she’s heard my sass, but she’s good at keeping her face still. How much do we really know about her? I think, but then Henrie is shouting too loudly, the earplugs already doing their work: “It’s my year to ring the bell!”
“Well then, go on. You two are old enough to be on your own up there. I’ve got to get in the shower. Ring it as many times as you want. I’ll make sure to give it a little push with my mind to get you started.” Ms. Sonia likes to pretend she’s got telekinesis or whatever it’s called. She says Eileen Fowler could move things just by thinking on them. That might be, Eileen and Elizabeth Fowler were magic, but the only thing Eileen and Ms. Sonia have in common is the dumb museum. It’s not like there is blood between them.
We head up the stairs that hug the wall of the old church spire. The stairs look old, but Ms. Sonia’s rebuilt them. Carrie’s been helping or, rather, trying to learn how to be helpful. She’s over here a lot. Like all the time. She’s got this idea that Quarry Hollow can be fixed up to be beautiful again if Ms. Sonia teaches her how to do all the things. Problem is, I don’t think it was ever beautiful. Not in the way Carrie thinks it was. It’s all strange angles and dark corners and too thick walls, like Great-Great-Grandpa built it special to trap the ghosts and keep out the light. Even the big front windows are covered by the roof of the wraparound porch, with shutters on the inside and the outside.
We reach the top of the stairs, three stories above where we started. It’s the second-tallest building on the island, and through the slats of the bell tower you can see forever in all directions.
Henrie is unwinding the thick rope from its resting place. “Is it time?” She smiles.
I’ve left my right earplug out. I keep the left side of my body toward Henrie so she won’t notice. Henrie pulls, and the sensation of the metal so loud and close is full enough to make my teeth hurt. The sun leaks through the slats of the bell tower, and a century’s worth of dirt rains down on us like toxic fairy dust. Henrie’s fingers do not meet on the other side of the rope unless both hands are used, so she’s latched on tight before the first pull. The bell is pulling her up and down on her toes before the third bang.
The noise doesn’t hurt, not really, but I can feel it hit my eardrum as surely as a slap to my cheek. It is booming—full and round in its sound. If I plugged my ear up now, the sensation of that sound might be contained in my body, where I might hear it again and again, but Henrie is looking at me and I don’t want her to know.
When the bell finishes ringing and the sound of the birds outside and the rustle of the leaves come back, I point my face to the outside world and take a couple deep breaths. Through the broken slats, some thirty feet below, I see Joshua.
“Henrie, it’s your lucky day. Look.” I point.
“Tell me who it is.” Henrie does not get up.
I watch until Joshua is gone from view, which doesn’t take long. He’s running with a couple other kids I don’t recognize up the steps and into the museum below. His hair seems blonder, as if he’s already spent a summer on island rather than just beginning one. “Joshua.”
Henrie has a weird expression on her face, a combination perhaps of wanting to throw up and wanting to look. I pick up a small pebble and throw it at her. Somewhere below us a door opens, then, after a few beats, slams.
“He’s downstairs,” I mouth at Henrie as if he’d be able to hear us.
“How did you do that?” Henrie whispers, as if I manifested Joshua. “I don’t really like him.”
“Bullshit.”
“He doesn’t even know who I am.”
“Sure he does. We hung out with him last summer.”
“He won’t remember me.”
“He does remember you.”
“How could you know that?”
“He kissed me last summer.” I forgot I had decided never to tell Henrie this, but remember as soon as her face turns all shocked and sad. “It wasn’t a big deal. Like a peck on the cheek.” It was more than a peck, and I’d started it. I’d been curious what it would feel like to kiss a boy, and there he was in the old bookstore on Division Street. I grabbed his collar and pulled him behind the curtain that separates the book-sorting area from the bookselling area. Our teeth clanked together and his lips were dry, yet a string of spit hung between us when I pulled away. It was the first kiss of many last summer. A sort of experiment on my part.
“Well, if he’s kissed you, then he’s already forgotten me.” Henrie shrugs, but hurt and worry are all over her face.
“I’m an asshole, Henrie. I’m sorry. I went to talk to him about you and it just kind of happened. He likes you. He told me he did.” This lie I know is too big. Too big if he doesn’t like her or remember her. Too big if she believes me, but now it’s out there, and her shoulders aren’t as high up around her neck, and it made her face uncrinkle.
What else could I have done? I think to myself, but Carrie says this is a famous line of mine. One I should stop using since it implies my actions are not within my control. “And we both know, Beatrice Bethany, that you have full control over that body and mind.” She always says “that body and mind,” the word that giving away how much she doesn’t like me.
I scramble around in my head to come up with a truth for Henrie so that the lie maybe gets smaller next to it.
“Remember that girl who summers with her friend’s family? They live in the limestone house on Division Street?”
“I love that house.”
“Yes, yes. The girl, Henrie, not the house. Focus!”
“Okay, fine. Was she Asian or something?”
“Japanese American. I was into her last summer—”
“Are you gay now?”
I picture Jennifer’s dark braid, which rested flat between her shoulder blades, and her unnaturally long fingers. She’s a loner. Always walking the island with headphones on or reading a book, never stumbling over sidewalk cracks or tree roots.
“Just because I made out with a chick doesn’t mean I’m gay. I’m not interested in Joshua. That’s the point.”
“Is she gay?”
“You are missing the point, Henrie.”
“Jennifer ignores me. She won’t even talk to me.”
Henrie’s told me how she tried to make friends with Jennifer last summer. She’d walked up to her and said, “What are you reading?” Jennifer told me later that Henrie asked even though it was perfectly clear that Jennifer was reading Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
“I did talk to Joshua. He knows who you are. He knows you like him.”
“Why would you tell him that? I feel sick.” Henrie flops onto her belly, pressing her forehead to the floorboards, and gives them a little pound with both fists before sitting back up to cross her legs with an exaggerated sigh.
“You’re always staring at him. He wanted to know what was up with you.”
“No, like really, I feel sick. My stomach is all tight and last night I couldn’t sleep it hurt so much.”
I look at my sister kitty-corner from me. Really look. She is cross-legged on the floor in her jean shorts, and a heavy shadow is on the seam between her legs. It takes me a minute before I realize it isn’t a shadow.
“Henrie, you’re bleeding!”
Henrie’s hands immediately go to her ears, probably to take out her earplugs, but also with a bit of a panic. She thinks the blood may be coming from her head, the bell having liquefied some piece of her brain. She looks at her hands as if for blood.
“Your period, Henrie! You have your period!”
This time she looks down between her legs. “No way,” she says in a daze.
I stand and go to her. Pull her up to her feet and kiss her cheeks and eyelids.
“This is it? Shouldn’t there have been other signs first?”
“Like what?”
“Boobs. More pubes. Something. Maybe the bell shook something loose and I’m dying!”
“Be serious, Henrie. This is awesome!”
“I wished for it and now it’s here,” she whispers. I can see the joy start to bloom on her face. “You know what this means?”
“It means you’re a woman, Henrie. We are both women!” I exclaim, then begin to howl like a wolf, which makes her laugh.
“Hen? B.B.?” Ms. Sonia hollers up.
Henrie shushes me, finger to lips.
“I know what to do, Henrie. Don’t tell her. We’re fine, Ms. Sonia!” I holler down, giving Henrie my best goofy grin.
“It means that my other wish might come true. The one about, you know…”
“Joshua!”
“Shush!”
“Oh, this is gonna be the summer, Henrie. Best ever. Come on!” I grab her hand and pull her up to her feet. We go down the old stairs, through Ms. Sonia’s home and out into the yard.
“I should clean up. People will see.”
“Let them see!”
“I should tell my mom.”
“We will. Soon enough. Come on! Run!”
“Slow down! I feel sick. B.B.!”
I do not slow down. I keep tight hold of her hand and slowly she matches my speed, running faster, running wild and screaming away from the graveyard and the little no-more church, back down Division Street and through our yard to the quarry. We scramble down rock into the quarry, then break through tall weeds to get to the edge of the quarry pond. We take off our clothes and jump into the water. It’s shockingly cold. The summer has yet to warm it. We dive down deep and hold our breath as long as we can, mermaid hair swimming around our heads, rusty red rising from between Henrie’s legs. We come up for a breath of air, then I take her back under, signal for her to follow me. Down near the quarry bottom is a shelf in the wall. A hole from which I extract a corked bottle.
“What is it?” she asks once we surface.
“It’s where we’ll keep our story. The summer we were both women. We’ll write it and hide it down there, and in a hundred years someone will find it and know what we did. Who we were.”
“Who are we?”
I smile and press my forehead to hers. “We are the Volt sisters. Think lightning bolts. Think electricity.”
I look to the sky. She matches my head tilt, and we listen to the island. Birds sing, somewhere a branch cracks, and beneath it all we can hear the land groaning, rocks grinding against one another.