Out of Salem

by Hal Schrieve

  “An officer hit them in the head with something . . .” Aysel didn’t mention the bigger conundrum: Z was supposed to be dead and dry as bone, and shouldn’t be bleeding at all.

  “I’m fine,” Z said. “I think I stopped bleeding when the light faded. It’s just still wet.”

  Aysel and Tommy exchanged glances.

  “Aysel, oh god, my baby, you should never have to see things like this. I am so glad they did not do this to you,” Azra said. She scrambled over two lumpish roots to put her hands under Z’s skull, near the place where the wound was.

  “I’m really okay,” Z said again.

  “Police all over town and you think you can run away on your own? You and Zee and this boy all being accused of attacking police and who knows what else, with everyone up in arms? You think you would be able to save your friend on your own, while running from the police? You didn’t think to ask if I could help?”

  Aysel stared at her mother. “I didn’t want to put you in danger. I don’t know if we’ll make it. But I couldn’t risk the police coming to our house, and I had to try to help Tommy and Z, since Z has nobody and Tommy can’t go home now, and I attacked a police officer—”

  “If they caught up with you alone they would take you back to the station and burn you and I would hear about it on television. What do you think I would feel if that happened? Do you think I could just go on with my life?” She was tearing up. She turned back and moved toward Aysel, engulfing her in a hug. “I am your mother, and I’m not going to let you act as if you have nobody in the world and have to fend for yourself. And I’m not going to let your friends grow up thinking that there are no people in the world willing to help them when it comes to a matter of crisis.”

  “You came and found us in order to save us?” Tommy asked. He still seemed to be trying to clarify the situation.

  “That was the idea,” Azra said.

  “It looks like you guys are okay on your own, though.” Elaine smirked. “Who did this bit with the trees? We should have done that part earlier.” She knocked her hand against the trunk of the nearest enormous cedar. Her movements looked worn out, hollow. “Would have saved a lot of trouble. Cop comes up to you, bam, the cop is a tree. Everything is a tree.” She paused for a second. “This is a mess of a day, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Aysel said. She felt drained.

  “We’re going to have to talk to each other, and be more honest,” Azra said. “If we get through this alive. You and I need each other, Aysel, and I can’t have you dying or leaving me. Think how my heart skipped when you were out and the werewolf house was raided, and then again when the fire—”

  “Elaine and the others were just trying to hide out, and then we were only in Archie Pagan’s office tonight because—” Aysel said. She looked at Tommy.

  “Aysel, I wouldn’t care if the werewolves were planning to set fire to the White House. But I want to know about it.”

  Aysel bit her lip and looked at her feet. She could feel Tommy watching her. “I didn’t know that’s how you thought,” she said finally.

  “I have to cast my lot with you,” Azra said. “And with your friends, now. This town isn’t safe anymore. We all have to run, together. Your friend says there are places in other towns where werewolves are safer. I don’t know what I’m doing, God knows, but I’m going to take you there.”

  “If we can ever get out of this forest,” Z said from behind Azra.

  They all looked around.

  “I swear I smell the ocean,” Tommy said again. “Do you think Z might have moved us? To the coast?”

  “I definitely saw a mailbox back there,” Elaine said. “In the middle of a bush. I’m not sure that’s what happened.”

  Together, the group moved uncertainly forward again through the brush. Elaine hoisted Z onto her back and carried them. Azra clung to Aysel, and brushed her fingers through her short hair repetitively, as if Aysel was a small child again. It was almost annoying, but Aysel didn’t stop her. Tommy trailed along next to Elaine, in the front.

  It had been almost half an hour of walking when suddenly, in front of them, Elaine fell out of view. She let out a shriek and there was an enormous snapping of branches and crashing in the brush ahead of Aysel. Azra screamed. Elaine’s yells grew slightly more distant, and then there was the sound of a splash. Aysel pulled away from her mother and ran to stand by Tommy at the point where Elaine and Z had fallen. They found themselves looking down into a ravine. At the bottom was a creek. Z had fallen off Elaine’s back and was half standing against, half clutching a tree growing on the mossy fern-covered incline. Elaine, some distance below, was picking herself out of the water. She sloshed back to the shore.

  “Fuck, that was a surprise,” she said. “Woke me up, though.” She held still for a second and then shook like a dog. Water droplets flew away from her in a great mass and then held themselves suspended in the air around her. Elaine pulled her fingers through her hair, now dry.

  “We should follow along the banks of the creek,” Tommy said. “It’s got to lead us somewhere. If we really are near the ocean this is the surest way to find out.”

  A branch with a low-hanging leaf dripped water into Aysel’s face as she slid as carefully as she could down to the bottom of the ravine.

  The shores of the creek were barely wide enough to walk on, and Aysel and Azra could not walk side by side, but she felt her behind her all the time. Ahead of her, Z and Tommy were holding each other’s hands. Z seemed to be gaining in strength the farther they went. Twice Aysel accidentally fell into the icy water of the stream, her feet slipping on the rocks. The second time she fell, she came up spluttering.

  “It’s salty,” she said.

  As they rounded the next corner, it became clear why. A roar, previously audible only to Tommy, overtook Aysel’s ears too. The creek and the ravine opened up toward the lightening sky, streaks of pink cast across it from where the sun rose behind them. Under the sky lay the ocean.

  “That’s impossible,” Azra said. “We were miles and miles inland.”

  “I think it’s clear that nothing really is where it was before,” Elaine said.

  They picked their way down the last rocky incline and landed on the hard brown wet beach. The water crashed onto the shore, dredging up brown and green seaweed and leaving, on its retreat, open pores in the earth through which clams squirted. Aysel stood and looked out at it. It had been years since she had been to the sea. Z turned to her. The first light of morning illuminated their face.

  “I think today is going to be better than yesterday,” they said.

  There was no sign of a road leading to the beach, but Azra said she could see a house on top of a high bluff in the distance, its western windows starting to gleam in the sunrise. At first Aysel could not see it, but when she looked harder she could spot a light on in one window.

  “We need to go toward it,” Azra said. “At least to find out where we are. Not all of us have to go up.”

  They walked toward the distant bluff.

  Far out in the water, there were small black things bobbing in the surf. It took a moment, but eventually Elaine yelled that they were seals. Z’s head whipped around and they stood a long time looking out at the animals.

  “Do you think one of them could be Mrs. Dunnigan?” they asked. “She said she was going to do magic to protect me, from the ocean.”

  “Maybe,” Aysel said.

  The seals made no move to come ashore.

  When they reached the bluff, they stood, for a while, looking at one another and the water. There was a staircase carved into the grainy stone, with one wooden handrail. The sun had almost made the entire sky orange by the time Z grabbed Aysel’s and Tommy’s hands and pulled them forward, and all of them began the slow climb.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I first want to offer thanks to Leylâ Çolpan for offering invaluable information on the details of growing up in America as part of Turkish diaspora and providing me with id
eas about how to think about magic and nationality, magic and religion, and magic and family. Leyla’s own poetry and other writing has always been astounding and I was so lucky to have this input on my own book.

  I would like to thank Mal Nair, Tom Phelan, Alaz Ada, Seph Mozes, Phoebe Weissblum, Destiny McEntyre, Constance Zaber, Sherwin Shabdar, Nathaniel Zanardi, Sami Brussels, Eden Staten, Luis Galvan, Stephen Ira, Mairead Case, Emily Lampkins, Vivyan Efthimiou, Chaya Klarnet, Sharon Adams, Kyle Lukoff, Micah Brown, Nicholas Shannon, and my mom for reading my drafts in whole or part at different points throughout the writing process and giving honest and invaluable feedback again and again, and/or for connecting me with spaces or people that allowed my writing to improve. Thank you too to those people who offered input and feedback who are not listed here. I love you even if I do not know more than your internet handles.

  I want to articulate how lost I would have been without Cat Fitzpatrick, Jeanne Thornton, and Sanina Clark. I needed the intense and thoughtful work they put into helping me revise my manuscript. In 2016, Cat close-read my manuscript and helped me identify the things about trans communities before my time that I was leaving out and made me think about my characters’ relationships and how to resolve them. Cat, who is doing important work to connect trans authors with audiences and also to teach trans fiction in academic settings, also worked like hell to help me find a publisher who would give me the support I needed. She connected me with Jeanne, a genius and workaholic whose confidence in my book kept me going even when I was sure it would never reach a broader audience. In 2017, Jeanne helped me plot the story more, brought up ways in which I was leaving side characters out, and helped me figure out the goals and motivations of people who I had not thought about. Jeanne brought my book to Seven Stories, where Sanina Clark read it and advocated for its publication. Sanina’s painstaking editing and focus on timelines, character arc resolutions, and tiny details helped me make the manuscript a real book and worked to align the story in a way that made practical sense.

  I would be extremely remiss if I left out mention of mentors and role models who encouraged me in my writing from a young age or who created work I liked and were kind to me when I brought it up to them. The following is an incomplete list of people I want to appreciate here, some of whom I knew well and some of whom I met once: Mrs. Sheehan, Jason Gacek, Janet Hubbard, Katherine Deneen, Sandra Rowell, Kirsten Bennett, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Ned Hayes, Filiz Satir, Talcott Broadhead, Eric Fleming, my mom, Jane Yolen, and Sy Montgomery. I want to include a special thanks to Naomi Shihab Nye, one of my favorite authors, who, when emailed by a twelve year old ten years ago, corresponded with me about my vacation to my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma for three weeks.

  Finally, I want to thank Sebastian Blake Stott for reading the first thirty pages of a version of this story in 2013 and telling me it was good. Your encouragement stuck with me more than any other and kept me going with this project long after you were no longer part of my life. Rest in peace; may everyone who ever hurt you feel the weight on their conscience forever.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hal Schrieve grew up in Olympia, Washington, and is competent at making risotto and setting up a tent. Xie has worked as an after-school group leader, a summer camp counselor, a flower seller, a tutor, a grocer, and a babysitter. Hir current ambition is to become a librarian. Xie has a BA in history with a minor in English from University of Washington and studies library science at Queens College, New York. Xie lives in Brooklyn, New York, and hir poetry has appeared in Vetch magazine. This is hir first novel.

  ABOUT SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City. We publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Russell Banks, Octavia E. Butler, Ani DiFranco, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Coco Fusco, Barry Gifford, Martha Long, Luis Negrón, Peter Plate, Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Stringer, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Subhankar Banerjee, the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Noam Chomsky, Angela Y. Davis, Human Rights Watch, Derrick Jensen, Ralph Nader, Loretta Napoleoni, Gary Null, Greg Palast, Project Censored, Barbara Seaman, Alice Walker, Gary Webb, and Howard Zinn, among many others. Seven Stories Press believes publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights, and to celebrate the gifts of the human imagination, wherever we can. In 2012 we launched Triangle Square books for young readers with strong social justice and narrative components, telling personal stories of courage and commitment. For additional information, visit www.sevenstories.com.