All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages by Saundra Mitchell

Author:Saundra Mitchell [Mitchell, Saundra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-01-11T19:38:55+00:00

WILLOWS

BY

SCOTT TRACEY

Southwyck Bay, Massachusetts, 1732

The shock of red hair against the black ocean froth disappeared beneath the surface as Benjamin remembered a time when his own hair had been that same shade of fire-dark. A time when he’d stood on the Highlands and let the wind ruffle the hems of his skirt and pulled his hair back and tangled it into loving knots. He had been she then. Her name was Mariot, and she knew well what it was like to sink beneath the swell.

It had been many years since Benjamin had been alone in his own head. Memories of other lives, other versions of himself, grew with every year. He was the only one in Southwyck who knew himself in that way, who knew that one life was never really the end.

“Mercy Elizabeth Dare has been committed to the waters that once stole away our children.” Reverend was in a frightful mood. He was more theatrical than his father had been as guiding hand for the village of Southwyck, and even when drowning a girl of fifteen he felt like the act needed something more. Words. So many of them.

Benjamin watched the last traces of her disappear beneath the water, and soon even the bubbles that could have carried her last words had ceased. The waters churning below them were unforgiving as ever—the ocean would take her and hold her deep where none would harm her again.

In other villages, witches were drowned, or, if they refused to plead, were pressed to death. Elements of a natural world. In Southwyck, they preferred a more immediate solution to the problem. A small cliff at the tip of the headlands overlooked the shredding rocks below, and the cursed fell as quickly as the innocent. Over the years, the rocks gorged on so much blood they now kept a crimson cast, a stain to the stone that announced their intent and hunger for the castoffs. The rocks were hungry, and soon they would feed on Benjamin.

“Blessings on the family Dare in their moment of acceptance,” he continued. His rum-roughened voice was no more pleasant now than when he had been cups deep the night before with Benjamin’s father and the other elders. A night of drinking always preceded a morning of Return.

That was what they called it when they dropped one of their children off the high rocks that overlooked the inlet of Southwyck. The Return. The Elders taught that because of their burdens, the people of Southwyck held vigil.

The children born in Southwyck were not like children born in other villages. Not for many years now. The children born in Southwyck were as dangerous as girls whose tears would summon storms, or boys who left fire in their wake, even when a thing should not burn.

There were other curses that were worse. Curses like a girl who could not be lied to, or a ten-year-old boy who gathered secrets that no one meant to tell.

“Long has the village of Southwyck prospered even in the face of its burden.

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