Anna Lea Jancewicz

Once, there was a boy who swallowed a bee. His mother told him not to do it. She wrung her hands like threadbare dishrags and keened, but he didn’t listen because sometimes little boys do not listen to their mothers. The bee didn’t sting his throat or his belly, but it didn’t die either. It buzzed around inside of him and made itself at home. It started building a castle made of wax. The castle got bigger and bigger inside him until there was little room left for anything else. It nudged against his heart and his lungs. Its spires pushed at the roots of his teeth, thrusted them out of his mouth one by one. His mother collected the teeth in the pockets of her kitchen apron and then she saved them in a pretty hatbox she kept on the top of her dresser. The boy cried and had to eat soft foods. His mother made a lot of chocolate pudding for him.

When the bee was finished building the castle, it invited ghosts to come and live in its many rooms. The ghosts brought little things with them. Thimbles, hairpins, lost earring backs. Springs and cogs from inside wristwatches. Shiny pennies. Slowly, the boy’s body began to grow heavier. He wasn’t so good anymore at winning foot-races or hopping fences. Other children made fun of him because they could hear him rattling and jangling inside as he walked. He tried wearing a thick parka to muffle the noise, but it wasn’t that cold out and so it was very uncomfortable. His mother said Enough is enough and she took him to see the doctor. The doctor ordered a lot of x-rays and he looked at all the little things inside of the boy and listened with his stethoscope to the buzzing of the bee and the whispering of the ghosts. Then the doctor sucked his coffee-stained teeth and shook his bald head and said he would not operate on the boy. He said the boy would probably die and then the mother would sue him for a lot of money. The doctor said No way, José. The boy was confused because his name wasn’t José, but his mother explained that it was just a saying. Know what I mean, jellybean? she said. The boy cried some more and his mother made more chocolate pudding.

The mother decided they would go to see the witch who lived on 35^th Street. The witch lived in an apartment over top of the laundromat and she had four cats. Her apartment smelled like boiled potatoes. The apartment was also extremely hot, from all the heat of the clothes dryers below, compounded by the fact that all the windows were veiled in thick plastic sheeting sealed with Hello Kitty duct tape. The boy and his mother were damp with sweat right away, but the witch’s skin was matte and dry even though she was wearing a heavy woolen poncho. It had gray and brown fringe, and beads carved from a variety of different woods. When the boy and his mother sat down on the witch’s sofa, its plastic slipcover made a fart noise. The witch turned her head away, but they could tell she was giggling. After the mother had explained their predicament, they all sat in silence for a moment.

Then the witch told them that usually she did things like making love potions out of stolen hair clippings or boiling avocado pits to make a fertility tea, or sometimes making little bags of gross dead things that would curse people who parked in handicapped spots when they weren’t allowed to do it. What you need is going to be very sophisticated she said. The mother asked if the witch would be able to help them. Okay, yeah, she said, but it’s not going to be easy, so for payment I want a flat-screen TV and also the DVD boxed set of WKRP in Cincinnati. The boy looked at his mother. His mother looked at the witch. What? the witch said. I’ve always had the hots for Howard Hesseman.

The first thing the witch did was make it even hotter in her apartment. The idea was to melt the wax of the castle. She bundled the boy up in several musty old fur coats that she’d had stashed away in her attic crawlspace and got out the kerosene space-heater she used in the winter. The boy’s skin turned bright red and he lost consciousness. He had dreams about department store mannequins coming to life and breakdancing in the cafeteria at his school. But it worked. He started weeping wax. Sweating wax. Wax poured from his ears, his nose, his mouth. He pooped wax. It was horrible to behold. His mother had to duck into the witch’s kitchenette and get sick in the sink. The witch rolled her eyes toward the cobwebby ceiling and muttered Gawd. I’m doing it all for you, Howard Hesseman.

To flush the ghosts from the boy’s body, the witch prepared an herbal enema solution. She would not divulge the formula, but it smelled strongly of rosemary. She took the boy into her bathtub and rinsed him out thoroughly. Only one ghost was expelled. The ghost sat on the witch’s shag-carpeted toilet seat with a smirk on his face and a ball cap on his head that read Direct Action Gets the Goods. He explained that the ghosts had organized, and he was their union representative. They’d become Wobblies. Strength in numbers. He was there to negotiate the collective bargaining. The boy’s mother was indignant. She was skeptical about the ghosts’ status as “workers.” The ghost said that they’d started a factory in the wax castle. They’d been producing ghost-shirts. Their means of production had been destroyed. He called the boy’s mother a capitalist stooge. It was not a friendly exchange. The witch called a time-out so they could all cool it. She made a nice pitcher of catnip-spiked lemonade. They all sat on the sofa and sipped. The mother got a chocolate pudding snack-pack out of her handbag for the boy. He ate it with a plastic spoon and eyeballed the ghost timidly.

It was finally decided that the ghosts would vacate the premises, which was to say, the boy, on the condition that they would be provided an adequate space to set up their own ghost-shirt co-op. The witch was kind enough to offer her linen closet, which sounded kind of paltry at first, but was in fact more spacious than an eight-year-old child’s abdominal cavity. The workers’ committee agreed to the provision that they would take their little things with them. The thimbles, the hairpins, the lost earring backs. The springs and cogs. The shiny pennies. The witch offered the ghost-workers two small but very attractive Salvadoran baskets, hand-woven, to store their goods. The baskets would not fit in the linen cabinet, but the workers would enjoy full access to them under the bathroom sink. The ghosts fled the boy’s body in a mass of raveled whispers and clinking communal property, and the boy felt lighter immediately. He got up and bounced on the witch’s sofa, making gleeful juvenescent sounds. The witch said Mellow out, kid.

That left only the bee to deal with. The boy could feel it thrumming behind his rib cage, tickling, although he couldn’t tell which emotion was fueling its activity. He figured maybe if it was really mad about the evictions it would’ve stung him already, pierced some vital organ. The witch burned a bundle of desiccated sage and wafted the smoke up the boy’s nose. He sneezed, and the bee was disgorged through his mouth. The bee settled upon the witch’s coffee table, between the empty lemonade pitcher and an issue of TV Guide. There was a dirty-looking person from a zombie show on the cover. Everybody waited for the bee to speak.

After a few anxious moments, the boy’s mother loosed an exasperated sigh and said Has anybody considered the possibility that the bee can’t talk, because it’s, you know, a bee? The witch frowned and shrugged her shoulders, said, Yeah, okay. You’ve got a point. The boy piped up, I learned in school that bees communicate through dance. Then the boy rose to his feet and performed a sublime, heartbreaking interpretive dance piece that any jerk could obviously understand meant I am sure sorry that I swallowed you and I hope you are okay and that you will go live someplace else besides my insides because I just want to be a normal boy again. The bee quivered. It did a little Gangnam-style horse move. The boy crossed the room and opened up the witch’s front door, and the bee flew off without making a heavy thing out of good-byes. Gawd, said the witch, I’m glad that’s over. The boy and his mother both said, Me too simultaneously. But what about his teeth? the mother then added, the edges of her smile sagging. Yeah, okay, said the witch, that part’s really easy. All he’s got to do is let me eat one of his fingers. You can choose which one. The boy and his mother blanched. No, haha, I’m just fucking with you, said the witch. Just a little witch humor. You kept the teeth, right? Just have him swallow them all and then drink this. She got out a battered bottle with a grubby cork plugging its mouth. It was half-full of sloshy murk. There’s not poop in there, is there? asked the boy. Don’t ask questions, said the witch, and make sure you chug it.

They all got into the mother’s station wagon and drove to Target, where the witch picked out a flat-screen TV. She didn’t choose the top-of-the-line model, but she didn’t choose the cheapest one either. That night, the mother ordered the WKRP in Cincinnati DVD boxed set on Amazon. It was on sale for $84.75, plus shipping. It would be delivered to the witch’s apartment within 7-10 business days. The boy drank the bitter liquid from the bottle after swallowing all of his teeth. They grew back right away, all at once, and it was awfully painful, but he was very glad to have teeth again so he didn’t whine about it.

His mother made his favorites for supper, all things he had missed so much when he’d been a toothless loser. He gnawed on pot roast with no carrots, toasted bagels with blueberry jam, and corn on the cob glossed in butter. His mother told him there was, of course, plenty of chocolate pudding for dessert, but he was sick of chocolate pudding and pretty sure he’d never eat any again as long as he lived. That part didn’t turn out to be true, but it did take a few years before he ate it again. After dinner the boy left his mother to wash up the dirty dishes. He cozied up under his favorite blanket and skimmed happily along the surface of sleep. His mother poked her head into his bedroom a little later and said, Okay, buddy, don’t forget to brush those nice new teeth! The boy nodded drowsily and said that he would, but he didn’t. He was swamped by pleasant dreams. And deep in a cranny of his backmost bottom left molar, the tiny inkling of a cavity was yawning into being, because sometimes little boys do not listen to their mothers.

Anna Lea Jancewicz lives in Norfolk, Virginia, where she homeschools her children and haunts the public libraries. She is an Associate Editor at Night Train, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming at Atticus Review, Hobart, Necessary Fiction, Phantom Drift, and many other venues. Her flash fiction “Marriage” was chosen for The Best Small Fictions 2015. She is working on her first novel. Yes, you CAN say Jancewicz: Yahnt-SEV-ich. More at: annajancewicz.wordpress.com

Stone Showers

Clancy’s Place wasn’t so much a restaurant as it was a place for the local ranch hands to hang out in those long dry hours that separated quitin’ time and sundown. Clientele most days was a mix of ropers, wranglers, and the occasional drifter drawn in by the smell of charcoaled beef. If the weather was fair, most of the boys sat on the wraparound porch. From there, they could see the stables out back and the hog pens too. And if the wind was just right, they could even smell ‘em both a little bit — and not just the good parts either.

Clancy bred his own beef, Angus mostly, and that’s how he kept his prices so low. But in the past few years he’d branched out into pigs, and one of those had earned himself a bit of a reputation thereabouts. That one they called Hellraiser.

Now Hellraiser was just what his name implied: an 800-pound monster that Clancy had raised up from a little piglet. He was mean as pigs go, more wild than tame, really — as likely to charge a man as he was to pee on his boot. Clancy said he tried to keep him penned up, but Hellraiser just kept breaking down the fences. Truth be told, Clancy was scared of that animal, and rightly so.

Most of the time Hellraiser ignored the hands that came to visit. But every now and again he would get this mean look in his eye and grunt like someone had kicked him hard in the flank. Those that were paying attention usually moved inside when this happened. Those that weren’t soon wished they had.

Whenever Hellraiser got himself into one of his moods, he’d shake his head a little bit, and then without any more warning than that, he’d charge right into the midst of whatever crowd he could find. Tossing his head back and forth like a bull on rampage, that pig would proceed to scatter men like driftwood. Clancy would run out onto the porch then, the distraught pig owner flapping his arms like a giant mother hen. After a lot of yelling, and sometimes even a little bit of swearing, Clancy would eventually manage to get that hog rounded up and settled into one of the pens out back. But by the time he’d done that, most would have already gone home to have their dinner somewhere more peaceful.

Of course, it wasn’t always so exciting around Clancy’s place. Most nights the boys just sat around swapping stories. By the time the crickets began to chirp, that deck of Clancy’s would be littered with tall tales and empty cans.

Out of all of ‘em, Pinky Wilson was the best at spinning out yarns. That boy was a natural-born storyteller — or bold-faced liar — it was hard to tell which. They called him Pinky ‘cause a dog had gnawed off his little finger back when he was a kid. Pinky hated that nickname. But once something like that sticks to you it don’t never go away.

Anyways, Pinky was telling a story about how he’d wrestled a bear one time, when a car nobody had ever seen before turned in off the highway. The ranch hands all went quiet as soon as they saw it, even Pinky. Out front, Hellraiser had found himself a shovel and that pig was gnawing on the handle just like a dog might do with a bone. Even the pig looked up as the car drove past.

See, Clancy didn’t get many city folks out to his place. At least he didn’t used to. But a couple years prior a group of do-gooders had managed to get the hills behind Clancy’s place declared a National Scenic Area — which was kind of a joke amongst the locals, since there really wasn’t nothing much up there but sagebrush and rattlers. But ever since they done that, those hills had been overrun with city folk.

The car rolled real slow down the driveway, almost like the driver hadn’t yet made up his mind whether this was such a good idea or not. The man parked out next to the flowerbeds, but left his engine running. He said a few words to his wife, then stepped out of the car. Stretching himself up real tall, he nodded in a dignified sort of way.

“Howdy,” he said.

City folks always seemed to start conversations that way — almost like they thought that was the way people was supposed to talk when they got out away from the city.

“Howdy,” Pinky replied. “What can we do you for?” Pinky was always happy to give people what they was expecting.

“We saw your sign out by the highway,” the city boy said.

Pinky nodded real slow. “Yep. We seen it too.”

The visitor considered this for a moment. I guess he wasn’t too sure what to make of Pinky. He glanced back at his wife, then looked around at the rest of the men gathered there on that porch. Behind him, Hellraiser dropped the shovel he’d been gnawing and lumbered to his feet.

“I was hoping one of you might be able to help us out.” The man waited for someone to respond. When none did, he went ahead and kept talking. “You see, we’ve gotten ourselves into a bit of a situation,” he said.

The visitor was small for a full-grown man — couldn’t of weighed much more than a buck forty. His forehead and upper lip were both white with salt — kinda like he’d been sweating but the moisture had all dried up.

“A sit-u-ation?” Pinky said.

The city boy licked his lips with a tongue dry as sandpaper. “We were having a picnic out on the desert,” he said. “It’s a National Scenic Area now, you know. Anyway, we had all of our food in a knapsack, and we put our wallets in there too, just for safekeeping.” Behind him, Hellraiser shook his head from side to side, almost like that animal was trying to shake loose an idea.

“Well, you might not believe this,” the boy said, “but while we were having our picnic a rattlesnake crawled into that knapsack.”

The visitor paused in his telling as if waiting for someone to comment. Out in the yard, the hog snorted and pawed at the ground. The city boy looked at him and smiled. That poor fool didn’t have any idea what kind of danger he was in.

“That there’s a pretty good story,” Pinky said. “What happened next?”

The city boy turned his back on Hellraiser. I guess nobody had ever bothered to tell him that bacon could actually be dangerous.

“Well, we did everything we could to get that rattlesnake out,” he said. “We poked it with sticks. We threw rocks at it. But I guess that snake just didn’t want to come out.” The boy was having trouble talking now. “The sun gets pretty hot out on that desert,” he said.

“Yep, it sure does,” Pinky replied.

“We were getting pretty thirsty by then — ” The boy swallowed hard as if to show what he meant. Pinky smiled and waited for him to go on. The city boy wiped at his brow with a red handkerchief. “Well, we finally decided we couldn’t wait any longer. But when we got back in the car, we realized we didn’t have enough gas to get us home, and all of our money was back in that knapsack.”

Pinky took a long draw off his drink. The hog grunted.

“That does sound like a pretty good predicament,” Pinky said. “What’d you do next?”

The city boy’s jaw twitched a little bit, almost like Pinky’s bull-headedness was starting to rile a bit. The boy swallowed hard, then looked down at the ground.

“I guess we was hoping one of you gentlemen might be able to help us out with some gas. And maybe a drink of water.”

A couple of the ranch hands laughed at being referred to as gentlemen. Pinky leaned forward in his chair, the wooden legs creaking. Across the yard, Hellraiser shivered. The sound of Pinky’s chair had obviously set him on edge.

“Problem is,” Pinky said, “This here ain’t no gas station.”

Now Pinky wasn’t really being mean to that boy. He was going to help him out eventually, and everyone sittin’ there on that porch knew it. But they also knew that Pinky liked to have fun with people when he saw an opportunity. And that poor boy had walked straight into this one.

Pinky scratched at his chin for a minute, then leaned back in his chair.

“You know what,” Pinky said, “I like you. You seem like a decent young feller. I think I might just have a solution to your problem.”

“Go on,” the boy said.

“Here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m going to treat you and your wife to dinner, and all you can drink too. And, heck, I’ll even throw in a free tank of gas.”

“What’s the catch?” The boy asked. I guess that city boy wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked.

“Catch?” Pinky said. “Ain’t no catch. You just have to ride that there hog is all.”

The city boy turned and looked in the direction that Pinky was pointing. Hellfire returned his stare, a bit of drool leaking down of the side of his snout.

“Is it safe?” The boy asked.

“Sure it’s safe,” Pinky said. “Just as long as you hold on tight.”

Now any sane person would have walked away right then. But I’ll be damned if that boy didn’t look like he was considering Pinky’s proposal.

“I’ll have to talk to my wife first,” he said.

“You go right ahead and talk,” Pinky said. “The hog’ll wait.”

The city boy walked back to the car and spoke to his wife for a minute, the hog eyeing him the entire time. Inside the car, the woman looked like she was angry with her man — almost like she blamed him for the whole deal with the rattler. Women can get like that sometimes. Ain’t no explaining it — that’s just the way they’re made.

The city boy looked back at Pinky and nodded. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it. What are the rules?”

“Rules?” Pinky said. “Ain’t no rules. You just stay on that hog for eight seconds and dinner’s on me.”

The boy nodded, his upper lip quiverin’ just a bit. For a second he looked like he might back out, but then he marched up to Hellraiser and held his hand out like a man might do when meetin’ a dog for the first time. The hog opened his mouth.

“You be careful, Kenny.”

That there was the man’s wife. She had rolled down her window and was leaning half way out of it so that she could get a better view. Hellraiser and Kenny both turned to look at her, and I’m not sure which one had an angrier look in his eye.

“You stay in the car,” the man said. “This won’t take but a minute.”

Then, quick as lightening, Kenny jumped onto the hog’s back. He grabbed hold of its ears and dug both heels into that pig’s hindquarters. Hellraiser for his part looked mighty surprised by this turn of events. He squealed real loud and took off running. Those stubby pig legs were pumping fast, dust flying every which way. Hellraiser ran clear across the parking lot, crashed into one of the fences, then turned and ran back the other way again. By all rights that boy shoulda fallen’ off straight away, but by some miracle he managed to keep himself aboard. Kenny had a hold of that pig’s ears just like he thought they was reins on a mare, and after he’d been on for a bit he even learned how to turn that hog just by pulling on one ear a little more than the other.

Now Pinky had told that boy that he only had to ride the hog for eight seconds. But getting on a pig is one thing. Getting off him again once he’s worked himself up to full gallop is something else entirely. Truth be told, no one knows how long that boy rode for, but it musta been closer to eight minutes than eight seconds. ‘Course, all the boys on the porch started whoopin’ and hollerin’ just as soon as they realized what they was seein’. Even the man’s wife got into the celebration. As Kenny rode past for the third time she got out of the car and commenced to jumping up and down and clapping her hands. She seemed right proud of her man, and rightfully so. It turns out that woman’s husband was a natural-born pig wrangler.

Now right about then was when Clancy come running out onto the porch. He didn’t seem none too happy with what he saw.

“Get that fool off my pig,” he yelled.

‘Course it wasn’t the boy that Clancy was worried about. But it didn’t matter much anyway, ‘cause right about then Hellraiser collapsed into the dust, his sides heaving with exhaustion. And I’ll be tickled if that boy didn’t step right off him just like he was some sort of conquering hero. When the boys on the porch saw this they all rushed out and lifted Kenny up onto their shoulders. They paraded him around the yard for a couple of minutes and then up onto the porch. Everyone was laughin’ by this time, and all of them talkin’ about the amazing thing they had just seen.

Pinky was true to his word. He bought Kenny and his wife dinner that night, and even filled up their gas tank just like he’d promised. And Hellraiser? Well, he recovered all right. ‘Course he kept his distance for a while. But you know what? Not a single person complained about that, not even Clancy.

Stone Showers lives in Central Oregon with his wife and two children. He has never actually ridden a live hog (or a dead one for that matter) but knows people who have. His short fiction has recently appeared in or been accepted by Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things, Stupefying Stories and Black Denim Lit.

Marina Favila

She bought the blue spruce as a symbol of their love, something strong and beautiful and growing.

She planted it in the backyard, not so it couldn’t be seen, but so she could see it from the dining room window, for she was the only one who mattered. Let her neighbors sate themselves on their white-blooming pears and flowering cherries; she wanted a tree that would last throughout the year, that could weather storms and winter snows, the cold of a New England January or February, and still retain its perfect self.

And the color! Those sharp-edged prickly needles refracted the light like a prism into multiple shades of blue-grey and sea-green. And perfectly shaped, too, a fat triangle, with a thick trunk, and a root ball the size and weight of a marble step. She had to fight off a local farmer looking for trees to block the wind for his oh-so-precious crops, just to make sure she got this blue spruce and not the scraggly one with a missing branch, or worse, the sickly-sage Norwegian with its bald spot on the backside. No, it had to be this one, and she got it. She even paid to have it picked up in a truck and then planted by a professional, for she didn’t want to risk a mistake from her inexperience in these matters. And now it stood in majesty in the backyard, close to six feet already. Nothing was going to knock that baby down.

So when the tree began to die, she was more than surprised. She was irritated.

At first it was only the lower branches, which became brittle and yellowy, drooping to the ground, almost downcast, she thought. Love, love, it needs love! And she immediately trooped to the downtown Lowe’s for a quick lecture on the evils of chemical pesticides, but the benefits of organic mulch. Was it getting enough water? Was it getting too much? What was the pH level of the soil in her backyard? She listened to it all, and returned home with all-natural weed-resistant chips and spread them just beyond the canopy. And it perked right up. Within days it seemed to be standing straighter, its branches expanding to the side, even reaching for the sun.

But it wasn’t a week before some weevil type misery was crawling around its delicate spikes: dark brown insects with snouted faces. She tried to squash them between her gloved fingertips, but they were miniscule and there were so many of them. She suspected there were thousands more unseen, covering her beloved spruce, munching on its silvery brown roots and greenish-blue foliage — how could she kill them all without hurting her tree? Again to Lowe’s, and then when nothing looked quite good enough, to the posh Garden Spot, for some high-powered fungicide to soak the ground, which would kill the mites and strengthen her tree, so said the shop’s resident arborist.

This time it took a month, but, really, so worth it, so worth checking on her tree every morning and every night. Patting the earth with hollytone and spritzing the needles with cottonseed oil. She’d even begun to talk to it, softly, like she was talking to her love, how she cared for it and would take care of it, but she needed it, too, needed it to be strong. And it’s not as silly as it sounds, for she had read that plants responded to the sound of your voice, and to touch as well. So she donned her plastic garden gloves to gently caress those poor limp needles and circle its trunk with her palms, trying to communicate her love and support.

And it got better, and again was standing firm and proud in the sunshine by early June. Even the color of the tree had deepened to a near emerald-blue. How lucky she was!

Life went on quite well for weeks. She’d sit on her back porch for her morning coffee, listening to the sparrows chirp, enjoying, now and then, a flirty meadowlark, lighting on her spruce’s branches. Butterflies had even taken to fluttering around the top of its tall pointy cone.

Then she began to think, and she’s not even sure how the thought came to her, that the tree was moving — that is, moving away from the house.

How ridiculous she felt, and she told herself that no such thing was happening. Trees don’t get up and move! But every morning, and now in the evenings too, she’d walk around the tree and examine the ground to see if anything seemed roughed up or showed signs of someone digging. Perhaps an animal — a deer? — was leaning on it, gently, making it slant towards the woods, and thus it only seemed like it was moving further away. But the tree trunk was as straight as it had ever been, and the ground lay undisturbed.

So she let it go, or rather she pretended to let it go, but secretly she watched it through the window, peeking out so it couldn’t see that she was watching. If it was moving, she could catch it if she were crafty enough. In fact, if she varied the time of day she looked through the curtain slit, the tree would never suspect that she was checking on it, every hour on the hour. Twice she stayed home from work, and once parked a block away and walked back home, quietly entering by the garage door so the tree couldn’t see that she was back and watching it, all day now. But she never saw it move.

And she thought she might be going crazy, but she wasn’t crazy, the proof being that she had had that thought, the thought that crazy people never have, that they are crazy. And so one day, like any normal person, she just gave up and pulled out her measuring tape and measured the distance from the tree to the house. It read ten feet. She swore she had it planted closer. But maybe she was wrong. This was, after all, going to be a humongous tree, ultimately growing sixty to seventy feet tall. That’s why she had chosen it as a symbol of their love. So that must be it. It was just some trick of the season-turning sun, the light now hitting her spruce in such a way that it only looked like it was fleeing from her home and her loving care. But it was really just standing where it had always stood. She relaxed.

But by the following week, she was sure it had moved even further. And she pulled out the measuring tape again, and she carefully marked the distance with an old stone from the forest behind her house — a grave marker, she thought grimly — to make sure her measurements were on the mark. Three feet of metal tape laid flat upon the grass, then the stone to mark the end, and three more feet of metal tape, then the stone . . . well, you see how careful she was, and it added up, it added up to thirteen feet, a baker’s dozen of feet, how could that be? And why? Why was the tree moving away from her?

After that, after that irrefutable proof that the tree was trying to escape, there wasn’t much to do. Every day, she checked the distance, and then every night, and each time that tree was a good six inches further from her house and closer to the woods that edged her property. When it made it all the way to the boundary of her plot, she made one last effort to keep the tree by building a little fence around it. A beautiful white vinyl fence, a picket design, with a little love knot grooved into the connecting pieces. And she interlaced a lovely plastic daisy-chain — good stuff, from the Garden Spot, that looked real from even a short distance. And she promised the tree that it, or rather they, would be happy together, and she would take care of the tree, destroying any threatening prey, insect or otherwise, and feeding the earth plenty of nutrients to keep it healthy.

But the next morning the tree was over the line, the fence still standing, guarding nothing. And the spruce was sidled up next to a lithe redbud, just beginning to blossom into those thousands of tiny purple blooms that dot its silvery trunk, its branches reaching up and over and intertwining with the blue spruce in ways that made her feel sick to her stomach. And she thought she could see the blue spruce leaning towards it as well, as if it was the sun itself, and the tree was drawing its life from the redbud’s delicate, fresh scent.

And she couldn’t take it anymore. She doubted anyone could. And she went to her garage for her shears, and she cut every branch, every twig of that blue spruce. And she imagined that the tree was screaming, crying for her to stop, though she didn’t actually hear that, for she wasn’t really crazy. But she was filled with great emotion, conflicting feelings of sorrow and anger and guilt and fear of reprisal and love. Yes, love was there too.

And when every branch was severed, and she was absolutely exhausted, she took an ax from the garage, one she’d bought years ago but never expected to use, and she whacked at the base of the tree. It was harder than she thought, even without the branches to stop her or the needles to prick her, just that straight, naked, silvery trunk, shorn of everything that made it a blue spruce. She just whacked and whacked at it, throwing her whole body into the swing, until the tree began to tilt backwards. But even then, it was still hanging on, the open wound splintered and wet with the tree’s life juices leaking out, but finally weak enough that she could push the tree over into the brush. And she fell with that last push onto the tree, for it took all of her strength, and now she was straddling the trunk, her arms and legs caught and interwoven with the branches on the ground. And she paused for several minutes, breathing hard, hunched over that skeletal trunk, weak from the act, and crying herself, for the intimacy of that death was all-consuming.

When she finally untangled herself, her bare arms and legs bloodied with a thousand razor cuts from those sharp pine needles, she returned to the house to take a shower to wash away the sticky sap of her day’s labor. Blue-green stained her body in numerous bruises, and the pine scent permeated her hair and nostrils. Would she ever get rid of the smell?

Clean and newly dressed, she returned to the yard and buried the tree within the fence, at the edge of her property. She would shop for flowers in the morning to plant inside the little vinyl construction, something bright and red. Flowers would be the symbol of their love.

MARINA FAVILA is an English professor at James Madison University. She has published academic essays on Shakespeare, poetry, and film. This is her first creative publication.