Soft Into the Earth
Now, the morning table with pages and words before me. Each dark-slippered hour shuffling by outside. The shush of heat through the vents like distant downpours. I imagine trees, browning in autumn hills, their tahini undersides flashing in the wind. Horses lick the salt ring of the earth, the barbs on the wires, a memory of cold. It is also football season, and the world becomes an orange high-five, a jersey. Touchdown in the frost-tipped turf. Our team is always winning, but there’s a lot of game left. And just like every autumn, all the ghosts return to my house. Moths fly to the porch light and shed their scales on the windowsills. And my aunt returns to the driveway, cup of coffee in hand. Her husband still asleep inside the white van, there with the hot plate and the hand-held TV. I hear my aunt walk across the gravel and then up the front steps. In the bedroom, my nana slips on a coat. Satin seas slide over her arms. The sound of jewelry. My grandfather lights a cigarette. The two of them stand in the blue carpet of memory. Another uncle–my godfather–sketches in the dining room. Pen and ink drawings of Don Quixote, mad with chivalry. My other grandparents are there too, sinking soft into the earth of their recliners. And somewhere in the cold of the attic, my brother watches a movie. He wears the coat he used to wear. It’s long and black with pockets inside and out. In our old county high school, the other students, all cowboys with buckles and boots and expensive hats, used to call this kind of coat a duster.
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Everything is New Again
Come and walk with me through rows of damp and turned soil. I stir my grandmother’s rusted kettle for you and hold you like a favorite doll. Feel the bump of fabric eyes, the dash of baby lips. The mouths in our family are small. Most men hide them with mustaches. This too will be your mouth–your future lips thinning with age. Threading, feathering.
Come and be with me; bring all the lullabies in your silver cells. Come with your capes and plastic shoes, and swing in the hammock, twisting fingers in the netting. See the white bedsheets strung on the line, smelling of bleach. See the trees, the tablature of birds. Come and eat from my grandfather’s garden. Potatoes pulled from the clay and kept cool in the kitchen bin. Small sour apples fall away from the trees. Even now my grandmother’s ghost wakes to make the biscuits, opening and closing the kitchen drawers.
Come and sleep in the beds my father and his siblings slept in. Lay where they laid and feel what they felt. Your aunts in one bed, your uncles in another. Maybe they feared their own fast heart beats, the starlight in their bones. There is a painting on one of the bedroom walls, where the narrow bowl of a pipe resembles a finger tip. Imagine this is the case, and the finger, flushed with infection, longs for a home of hands. Out the window, hogs shuffle. There are pockets of old trees. Lay there and imagine as I once imagined, women salsa dancing. Their skirts ruffled and twirling. Shoulders smooth as sunsets. Wild hair and the sound of jewelry.
Come and sit by the fire in my grandmother’s powdery embrace, in the clock ticking all night, in the ash swept from the hearth, in the brine of pickles in their jars. Outside, you can’t know it, but a man is helping himself to the tools in my grandfather’s shed.
Come and hide behind the curtains. No one will notice you are there with the window cool against your back. Can you see my grandmother as a young woman left alone in this room for the day? She stands in her contractions, lost like an animal in a blue song in the quiet living room. She holds her breath, her sounds, her gaze, all of her holding still as an eyelid.
~
Lydia Gwyn is the author of the flash fiction collections: You’ll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Microfictions 2024, Appalachian Places, F®iction, Mom Egg Review, Waxwing, The Florida Review, Fractured Lit, and others. A selection of her fiction is also available in mini-chapbook form in Issue 22 of Ravenna Press’s Triples Series. She lives with her family in East Tennessee and works as an instruction librarian at East Tennessee State University.