He stood against my fury—his expression severe. My chest heaved and I will never forget the way he focused on me then, or how the words that came next caused something in my heart to stir that hadn’t roused in a long time.
Death reached for me, “Forever is a long time, Astoria. That’s why I’ve come. I only wished to make sure you were okay.”
Something stirred in me—a feeling long dormant, now waking—and my ironclad resolve to despise him began to slowly fade. I was a mess.
“No one should lie in their grief alone.”
“If I must walk the earth for an eternity, I think loneliness and I will become good friends.” Opening the door, I reached for the bag he brought and held it out to him. “Please go.”
“One night,” he pleaded, taking a hesitant step toward me. “You might not care to admit it, but we’re more alike than you think. As long as you’re cursed, I will haunt you.”
“I didn’t ask for this.”
“We scarcely ask for what we’re given.”
I couldn’t help but imagine the world as it spun—the seasons would change, the world would evolve, time would pass, people would grow old, and babies would be born. Countries would rise, and inevitably fall. Land would be tilled, harvests sown, and I will have become the same as Death—a relic. Forgotten, unmoving, faded, and broken with time.
“You forget,” I said, pushing him over the threshold. I shoved his bag into his chest and slammed the door, twisting the lock hard enough to rattle the frame. “That I hate you."
five
Astoria
October 2018
Ilearned early on, the burden of the Tempest curse.
I often wore it like a coat; a warm place to hide. Other times, it was a stone strapped to my back, bending me beneath its weight. Mostly, it haunted me, the way grief clings to sorrow, and I found myself shouting at the heavens, trying to pick a fight I had already lost.
My heart would clench as I watched my grandmother grow weary around strangers. We could be in a shop and they would ask for her name. She would pause, her face pinched in concern as she tried to remember what her mother called her. She gave fake names, a different one each time, because if she tried to use the same one, that too would disappear…
From our memory and hers.
Magicked away by some overbearing force that cast a gray cloud over our heads. Fake names offered no acceptance or stability, and she grew to become a recluse, barely leaving our cottage by the sea in Rhode Island.
It didn’t matter to me that she couldn’t remember her name. There was more to a name than just a sound to call your own.
My mother on the other hand was a different story. My grandmother would tell me stories of my mother's youth, of how she had a sparkling personality and made friends with anyone she met.
She named her Lucy and often called her 'my little light' because joy followed her, trailing behind like scattered sunlight through trees. It was that same light my father fell in love with.
My mother was seven months pregnant with me when she turned twenty-two and the curse changed everything for her.
Lucy was cursed to a life of bitterness and anger. Voicing foul and unkind thoughts, her words sunk deep into one’s mind, ripping it apart until nothing but regret and woe were left. It tormented her at first and she often covered her mouth, eyes growing wide in shame.
One could only spit venom so long until their hearts decayed to match their thoughts.
To everyone's surprise, my father, although not married to my mother, stuck around the longest. Until, even he could not bear her cruelty.
When I was born, Lucy named me Devlin, a name she handpicked because of its meaning—bad omen.In her words, why give false hope to a child with a name of promise?Like the one her mother had given her. My father, who had grown tired of my mother's apathy, gave me a second name:Astoria.
The way my grandmother tells it, the argument was long and violent, leaving my mother in a fit of rage and my father with a black eye. In the end, I was left with two pieces of him: hismother's name and a sealed letter with it scrawled across the front.
I often wondered what my life would have been like if my mother was not so difficult to love, but then again, now that enough time had passed I realized…
It was never really her fault. It was the curse, and her anger was all that was left of her in the wake of its destruction. Still, it left me fatherless and shut away in a cottage by the sea with a women cursed to live without a name and another I was to call mother, but only knew as Lucy. The woman who gave me my name and nothing else.
It’d been ten days since I’d last seen Death. Having finally worked up the courage to go home and rest, I sat on my worn-in leather sofa sorting through my bags. You think it would be hard to fit your entire life into two bags, but it wasn’t. When it came down to it, there wasn’t much you couldn’t live without.
