Strange Horizons, March 2026
“Bitter as the Sea” unfolds as an epistolary novelette set in 1883, structured around a layered, increasingly unstable correspondence between a woman who signs herself Francesca and a lover who calls himself Pyrame — pseudonyms drawn from the mythic lovers of Dante and Ovid, consciously shadowing the Tristram and Iseult legend that runs beneath the story like a riptide. Francesca is a self-educated naturalist and amateur enchantress living with her husband on the Île de R—, a flat, sea-ringed island she finds deeply unsettling. Pyrame is an ardent young poet who first noticed her in a bookshop and planted a letter inside a borrowed copy of Swinburne’s Tristram, initiating their clandestine exchange through a makeshift letterbox — a terracotta pot containing a dying honeysuckle outside a local café.
The correspondence crackles with wit, flirtation, and literary one-upmanship. Pyrame undertakes a genuinely dangerous errand on Francesca’s behalf — swimming through treacherous riptides to retrieve a berry from a legendarily ancient, cave-dwelling yew called the Dragon — and nearly drowns. Francesca, moved but wary, oscillates between cool deflection and unmistakable warmth. The story’s first turn arrives when Francesca confesses to her mother that Pyrame is not quite real: she originally conjured him herself, writing letters in a lover’s voice using ink mixed with ritual substances and a prayer to the spirit Herodias, in a bid to provoke her inattentive husband’s jealousy. But the spell escaped her control, and a genuine Pyrame — some autonomous entity born of her own magic and longing — began writing back independently.
The mother, revealed as a practitioner of the same occult arts, advises Francesca to poison Pyrame with an antidote brewed from the Dragon’s fruit, oleander, and mulberry wine — a dark inversion of the love potion of Tristram legend. Pyrame survives, having not drunk it, and counterattacks with a revelation: the mother, in collusion with Francesca’s husband, previously dosed Francesca with a potion to erase her memory of an earlier real lover. Francesca’s mysterious “faulty memory” and her inexplicable unease on the island are scars of that earlier erasure. She has been, in a sense, reenacting a story she can no longer remember.
In the story’s second great turn, Francesca — caught between her mother’s warnings and her own dawning recognition — ultimately follows her mother’s instructions and poisons Pyrame in the flesh, when Pyrame arrives for a visit disguised as a childhood friend named Camille. The death is rendered obliquely and devastatingly, Pyrame asking over and over, “But now the game is over, isn’t it, Francesca?” Only afterward, discovering her own hidden hatbox full of forgotten Reminders, does Francesca grasp what she has destroyed.
The story’s coda finds Francesca attempting to resurrect Pyrame through renewed incantation, and the final letter — addressed now to “Thisbe,” another code name for a beloved — suggests she has succeeded, or is perpetually beginning again: the cycle of summoning, loving, losing, and resummoning repeating itself like a tide. Bronstein’s central pun, drawn from Old French, echoes throughout: amer means simultaneously love, the sea, and bitter — a triple ambiguity the story inhabits entirely, blurring the line between enchantment and self-destruction, between the beloved and the self.
M.E. Bronstein is an academic and writer who teaches literary studies and creative writing at the University of Toronto. Her short stories and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. You can find her at mebronstein.com.