Evenfall by Liz Michalski

lightning just visible over the woods, and the sky was beginning to darken. From its spot at the top of the hill, Evenfall had seen its share of close calls, but this just made the storms more exciting.
    I was waiting in that heavy, suspenseful time just before the rain started, and I had my marble bag. I was too old to really play anymore, but I still liked to hold them when I was alone, the cool glass globes pouring through my hands. But one slipped from between my fingers and rolled across the room, disappearing beneath a floorboard. I thought about letting it go, but it was a blue aggie, one of my favorites. The board was against the attic wall, and there was a hole, just large enough for a marble. I hooked my finger underneath the board and pulled up.
    The marble was there, but so was something else. A faded square of cotton, folded and tied at the corner, too neatly done to have been placed there by accident. I picked it up, unfolded it, and caught the ring as it fell out. Cool and silver, polished to a bright sheen after all this time. It was a tiny thing, too small to slide over the knuckle of my little finger. I held it up in the darkening room. There was writing inside, and I had just enough high school French to make it out.
Je rêve que j’espère que j’aime.
    I jumped at the first crack of thunder. I could hear my mother calling me—she worried about my being in the dark of the attic by myself, afraid I’d light a candle that would burn down the house. I thought about taking the ring with me, but no hiding place I could think of was as secure as where it had been resting. I wrapped it back in the cotton—a handkerchief, I saw, embroidered with the letter W—and placed the bundle back under the floor. It stayed there until I was seventeen, when I took the ring out and kept it in my pocket every day for three months.
    Love, rage, bitterness, betrayal—the power behind these emotions is enormous. We feel them in our hearts, in our bones, in the very atoms of our being. A metal object, cool and untainted by human hands, could remain the bearer of those emotions, could contain the energy within it for years. A portable power source, if you will. One made more potent by its history and its hiding place, by the storms and the seas through which it was carried.
    Even when I was alive, there were times I thought I could hear the ocean from this attic, landlocked as it is. But now that I’m dead, there are spells, particularly during storms, when the waves seem to crash so loudly I fear the house will wash away.
    This house was built by my grandfather, a sea captain whose last voyage took almost two years. During his absence my grandmother’s hair turned white, though she wasn’t more than thirty. When he finally returned, he swore it was his last trip. He’d had enough, he said. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, feel solid ground beneath his feet, and eat apples plucked fresh from the tree, not dried and hardened into leather.
    But the house they lived in then was in New London, just a few streets away from the Long Island Sound. My grandfather awoke in the mornings with his eyes already searching for the ocean. The smell of the salt air was like the perfume of a lover, intoxicating him from across the room.
    My grandfather was torn. To go to sea again meant the risk of losing all. Even if he navigated his way safely through the storms that surely lay ahead, there were no guaranteesfor what he would find when he returned home: He could read the perils there each evening in my grandmother’s eyes as she brushed her long, white hair and gazed into the fire. Yet living so close to the sea was torment.
    To escape, he moved his wife and young family as far inland as he could bear. To my grandmother, the new house must have seemed like a reprieve, a testament of her husband’s love. She planted peonies and roses, grapes and apples, filled the house with cut flowers and fruit. She named the farm Evenfall, for the