giving you the chance to slide your knife in a quick arc to cut the muscle before they clamp closed. If you find a gasping, young, red-backed hake, send it back to sea, but eat any pea crabs straight away. She provided no prophetic justification for these actions, but that one exists we are sure.
Our eyes are drawn up past the silhouette of our home and the tangle of juneberry bushes and squat laurel trees. Up to the ridge where a line of lanterns flows over the crest and down the hollow’s road. Of course they did not come by sea, though it would have been quicker. The Long Kate they told tales of could work a fog up with a song. When Church told us that fable on one of his winter visits, she smiled and said that it was just that the fog followed her, and that she should be pitied, not feared, for it.
The yellow firelight of their progress streams down the slope with purpose, winking out as they turn to the north or south, returning as the road bends back west. But we can escape this progress for now, leave it behind, and move forward what will become of our daughters, and what stories they will tell of us.
I, the eldest, will spin out a line that forgets this island and near to all our mother’s spells. But it was necessary: the island would have sunk under the weight of Long Kate’s daughters had all three of us stayed. My line will touch the other coast, in time. Before that, my daughter, only the one, will be born close to the sea in a fishing town in Nova Scotia. Then she will leave me there to a house filled to the brim with husband and sons, fleeing further to live in Tamarack forests and to eat deer and hare and other things we never knew the taste of on the island. This will all begin at the moment two weeks hence, when Church, still uneasy with the events of this night, will offer to sail us away across the sound to Connecticut—further than Rhode Island but less likely to be a place where our mother is known, even in myths. Even now I know I will take him up on that chance, though it means I will not see my sisters again. There is just one spell my daughter and hers will remember well, but it will serve them in wild
30 | Psychopomp Magazine