Free The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard

it. She wasn’t a witch, my gran, but she was known for fixing things.
    The night Row died, she was all I could think of, but she was gone fifteen years by then, and my granddad too. I hadn’t inherited any of what she knew, and I hadn’t both- ered to learn it. All I had was the power to break. I knew she would have said that everyone born on earth started out liking the breaking of things more than the fixing of them. The point of growing up was to spend some years fixing before we started breaking again. My gran believed a person’s history mattered, that bad history could become something of use, if you paid attention, if you learned.
    I’d thought I was on the way to church, but there was another place I hadn’t been. Salem was two hundred miles away, but I could do it in a few hours.
    I stood there, in the hardware lot, thinking about it, scared and exhilarated at once.
    “Are you a handy sort of fella, or will you be looking to hire out the work when you fix up the house?” Ralph startled me, unlocking the dented metal door at the back.
    It was my house. “I want to do what I can myself.”
    The door clanged shut behind us. “All right then. We can start you an account, so all you have to worry about is the reckoning, when it’s finished.”
    I walked slowly through the hardware store. I’d need more paint, I knew. I shoved my hands into the loose pockets of my overalls. In each, cloth wrapped around metal. The horseshoes. They would need nails.
    No. I would need nails. Not for horseshoes, but for car- pentry. There were boards to be replaced, and the shutters hung off-true, and trim that needed to be tacked back down.
    The popcorn maker whirred and snapped into life, and the scent of hot butter and salt filled the store.
    “You don’t need to take care of all your obligations to the homestead at once,” Ralph said. “Give yourself some time to settle in, really get to know the place. Better to know something’s true character, than to have to come back and redo mistakes.”
    Paint, both the white for the walls, and dark blue, for the shutters I would rehang. Nails. Iron nails, not Naglfar’s, and not for shoes. Spackle, to fill in holes in the walls where keys had been. Some wood, of varying sizes.
    “Is there something that will fix the ground?” I asked Ralph as he rang up my supplies. “Where it’s been burned?” “Seems like a cursed place. Don’t know that anything will ever grow there, no matter what you do.” He shook
    his head.
    “Do you believe in that sort of thing? Curses?”
    Easier to think that too, that I was cursed to break things, rather than that I had broken them by being who I was.
    “Someplace like that, with all of what’s happened there, if it hadn’t already burned to the ground, I’d say that’s what should be done. I knew Olivia Weyland. She didn’t deserve any of what happened to her. She tried to fix things.”
    He hadn’t answered my question, but I didn’t ask it again.
    “What’s the best way to get to Salem?” I asked instead. He looked me dead in the eye for a moment.
    “Well. If you’re going to Salem,” he said, “you should borrow Lischen’s truck. It’s out there in the lot. She won’t mind. You’ve got an errand to do.”
    “I do,” I said. “I—”
    I almost asked him to go with me, but something in his look told me that was not welcome. He handed me a bag of popcorn and hauled the lumber and supplies out to Lischen’s truck.
    “It’s a drive,” he said. “But you might as well get it over.” “Get what over?” I asked.
    “Whatever needs doing,” Ralph said. “Plenty to do in Salem.” He smiled at me, and I got into the pickup. He pointed off into the distance.
    “Just go that way about four hours,” he said, “until you start smelling the ocean. You see waves, you’ve gone too far. They’d never put the prisoners where they could see the way to the water. People used to hop the walls. Now they’ve got barbed