Free The First Rule of Swimming by Courtney Angela Brkic

winters that were nothing but a killing season, with one small town on the entire island and no doctor to speak of ? There was nothing, she railed, but stone houses and electricity that died daily and water that collected in cisterns so that there was never enough for the humans and the animals to drink and a proper bath besides, never stopping to listen to her daughter’s protests that there had been water from the mainland since the late seventies.
    “I left,” Ana would tell anyone who asked, “because I knew that Rosmarina would destroy me as well.”
    It was conventional wisdom that islanders should marry people from other islands, but a marriage to someone from the mainland was sure to end in disaster. Magdalena’s father was from Šibenik, a metropolis in comparison with Rosmarina. “Your father wasn’t used to how quiet the winters were,” Ana would say. “That’s why he killed himself.”
    But Magdalena’s grandfather grew apoplectic at this charge. “Your father drowned,” he insisted. “And more than that we’ll never know.”
    Since leaving for the mainland after Goran’s death—which the local police ruled an accident—her mother had scorned anything that was from the island. Not for her the old wives’ remedies, the herbs that could cure headaches or lessen arthritis, the lavender or rosemary oil that eased tension and shrank lesions. She embraced the city’s noise and dirt. Her second husband, everyone readily told Magdalena, bore no resemblance to her first. And Nikola hated the island. “A backwater,” he used to taunt Magdalena. “An inbred shithole.”
    “It’s strange, I suppose,” Magdalena’s grandmother once told her. “There was a time when your mother loved Rosmarina, but she was a different person then. She was a good mother, too. She used to rock you and sing to you—”
    “I don’t believe it.”
    “It’s true,” her grandmother insisted. “But that was before.”
      
    Jadranka had not slipped anything into the books that she kept on a small shelf beside her bed. She had not even dog-eared pages to mark her place, though it was clear she had read each of them because their spines were cracked. Magdalena’s eyes fell on The Silk, the Shears , a memoir by the poet Irena Vrkljan, which lay horizontally across several other books. Its positioning seemed somehow significant, and Magdalena opened it to read The biographies of others. Splinters in our body. She closed it abruptly and replaced it on the shelf.
    Some of Jadranka’s clothes still hung in the closet, and sweaters were folded in a plastic crate. Magdalena pulled a gauzy scarf from a hook on the closet door and wrapped it once around her own neck. It still smelled like her sister, a mixture of soap, peppermints, and cigarettes, although they had both quit smoking together, making the pact on the night before Jadranka’s departure.
    When she dragged a chair over to look on the upper shelves, she found everything neatly organized, their mother’s chaos not having reached there yet. A few shoeboxes were stacked, one upon another, and she took them down and sat on the floor, spreading them out around her.
    Inside were receipts and old pay stubs, batteries, and half-empty tubes of makeup. There were photographs, pictures of their grandfather in his boat and of the sisters as children. In one shot they stood against a wall of the house, Magdalena—about five—looking to the side, as if something had suddenly caught her attention. But Jadranka, who appeared to be barely walking at the time, was laughing at the photographer, so that her eyes were nearly shut in the baby fat of her cheeks. Who could have made her laugh like that? Magdalena wondered. She could no longer remember.
    Down the hall, her mother turned off the shower, and a short time later Magdalena heard the radio on top of the washing machine jump to life. There were a few moments of white noise as she twirled the dial, passing through a weather