Next Summer’s Sacrificial Tadpoles

The girls are raised in side-by-side cottages on the river’s Baie de l’Est; as the summers pass, their limbs grow with the stretch of the bank that curves and swells. Every spring, the snowmelt waterlogs the soft earth into soupy mud. The mud clings to the girls’ ankles and squelches between their calloused toes, and when they stand hip-deep in the water, tape grass knotted around their calves, their sunburned bodies are bracketed by clusters of lily pads and knots of tadpoles.

Marie-Luce is fifty-six days younger than Stéphanie. Nearly five decades ago, when they were girls together, the fifty-six days were Stéphanie’s claim to a worldliness that Marie-Luce could not yet imagine.

It is Stéphanie’s older sister, Isabelle, a mysterious impression of a young woman, who teaches the girls — star-eyed at her attention — the methodology of spellcasting. Isabelle gathers driftwood to build bonfires in her cottage’s backyard; she writes pages of incantations, reading them softly before burning them; she collects roadkill to bury. She has the phases of the moon memorized, and can always point to where it will crest above the horizon. (“It comes back to where it starts,” she whispers to Stéphanie and Marie-Luce.) She has dark circles under her eyes, deep with permanently smudged eyeliner. She wears stacked silver rings on each finger, and dangly earrings that tangle in her hair, and she fights with her mother using a casual verbal violence that leaves Stéphanie trembling in awe and Marie-Luce craving solitude.

When Isabelle shows the girls a picked-clean, bleached-white skull of a raccoon, she holds their gaze and whispers, “Spellcasting demands sacrifice.”

One night, when Marie-Luce’s soon-to-be chronic insomnia is starting to rear its lifelong head, she peers out of her bedroom window to see Isabelle sitting on a window ledge, squinting up at the moon, covering and uncovering it with her thumb. The moon is red; there are wildfires in the north. 

The spell is Stéphanie’s idea, the summer after Isabelle teaches them the methodology and leaves the cottage for good. Stéphanie has a jam jar, rinsed clean, label soaped off, and at eleven o’clock, in the disarmingly yellow night of the summer’s last full moon, she and Marie-Luce scurry to the riverbank.

The sluggish waters of Baie de L’Est are home to countless American bullfrogs, and their tadpoles (unlike those of the spring peepers, shrieking into the cool nights of early summer) populate the waters well into August. In the past, sunk to her shins in mud, Stéphanie would snatch tadpoles in cupped hands, enchanted by their desperately wriggling forms, water leaking from between her fingers. So, it is no great surprise to Marie-Luce when Stéphanie, mouth crinkled at the corners, murmurs her plan for the spell:

“We’ll collect the tadpoles in the jar and show them to the moon.”

She swishes the jar through the shoal; her forearms are streaked with mud. When it emerges, the jam jar is filled with greenish water and at least a dozen wriggling bodies. Stéphanie screws the cap on tight. “It’s a spell for us to return every summer.”

“To come back to where we start,” Marie-Luce says, understanding. Still, eyeing the tadpoles, Marie-Luce’s fingers twitch. “They’re going to die.”

Stéphanie’s face is sincerely solemn. The moonlight glints off of her earrings, cheap silver triangles that Isabelle didn’t want anymore. “Spellcasting demands sacrifice,” she says, setting the jar down on a rock, bathed in the yellow-ish light. She takes Marie-Luce’s hand. “Say it with me. To return next summer.”

When Marie-Luce acquiesces, Stéphanie nods. “Now,” she says gravely, “we wait.”

Marie-Luce raises her eyebrows. “Here?” She loves the shores of Baie de L’Est more than anywhere else in the world, but not enough to spend her night curled up in a muddy riverbank.

“Maybe not here,” Stéphanie admits. “Let’s come back to check in the morning.”

Marie-Luce is the insomniac, and, consequently, the early riser. At first light, she pads to the neighbouring cottage to knock on the window of Stéphanie’s bedroom. It takes several rounds of familiar cajoling, but eventually, the girls trudge down to check on the tadpoles.

Marie-Luce’s heart sinks. The formerly lively bodies in the jar are belly-up, disconcertingly still, their colour fading to a dull grey. Stéphanie yawns. “I hope it worked,” she says. “I’m going back to bed.”

Marie-Luce does not follow. Instead, she perches on a weathered rock, unscrews the cap of the spell-jar, and eases the bodies back into the shallow water. She finds the moon across the river, low against the horizon, and closes her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says.

She is still sitting on the rock when the first tadpole wriggles.

  Several days after the spellcasting, curled in a corner of her school library, Marie-Luce learns that tadpoles can look dead before they are; that tadpoles can recover from acute hypoxia in a matter of minutes.

  Each year, the women return. There are the university years, the years when Stéphanie has her children, the year of the catastrophic flood, the year Marie-Luce’s mother dies, and later, the years Marie-Luce has her own children. There are the years when the women return together, and the years when Marie-Luce brings her husband, and the year that Stéphanie puts the cottage on the market, though her bluff is called when an interested buyer appears.

All in all, there are forty-eight years.

Every April, around the time of the snowmelt, the women start to feel a strange pull in their shoulders and an uncanny urge to check the position of the moon, and they both know that it will soon be time to go back to Baie de l’Est. 

Every August, the women repeat the spell to return next summer, and for the first years, they truly believe. Then, they promise each other that they are doing it ironically. Twenty years in, belief and habit and irony are intertwined. Or, as Marie-Luce says, “At this point, why stop?”

And each year, when Stéphanie staggers back to bed, Marie-Luce gives it another five minutes before pouring the tadpoles back into the river and watching for the first wriggle. She thinks of what it means to suffocate slowly — to cling to sacrifice as salvation. She thinks of Isabelle, who Stéphanie no longer talks about, so Marie-Luce no longer asks. 

While she waits, Marie-Luce finds the moon, hanging low on the western horizon; she stopped apologizing long ago.

“An offering,” she says, instead.