Issue 3: Spring 2017

Creative Nonfiction

From Roots to Fruit

Kiyah Moore

Soft dirt—squish, squish—beneath tiny, milky feet. They will never find us. Sandpaper, prickly cucumber leaves break my tiny, fattened legs out into rashes. Itchy. Warm Tennessee red clay, broken and cultivated into soft, plowed ground bursting open with corn rows and green beans and squash lay before me, a fairy-sized-barely-four-year-old. What would it taste like to the lips? Small eager hands continue to search. At last, purple has been found. Yummy. Mustering all the might a small force of nature could, I lift this glowing orb from the ground, and after taking a moment to triumph in the success of my hunt, sink my teeth into layers—dirt, skin, turnip. For a moment, this sits on my tongue, and then in a violent retch, it lays before my feet. I thought I had a good idea.

This failed attempt at feeding myself would propel my curiosity forward throughout the years, but never lessen my love for foods that grew in the earth, particularly the foods that grew in my grandfather's garden. Curiosity and exploration were the marrow of a life spent behind the confines of the chain-link fence on Snodderly Drive. Each day moved forward similarly—we all load up three doors down in the cobalt Super Beetle. Mama opens the door, carries me in, and lays me to fidget in the squeaky brass bed of my grandma and grandpa's home. And while I waited for my grandma to wake up (she truly never rose until 11 o' clock in the morning due to tired nights of watching The Jay Leno Show), I would toss on restless seas of chenille quilts, and imagine creating.

Thump, thump, drag, thump, rattle, rattle, sizzle. Those were the alarms of a grandfather emerging from his cigarettes and coffee in the basement. Quietly and carefully, he would stir up quick, creamy pots of gravy, and large platters of glistening sausages and buttery biscuits. I'd pretend to sleep, and then I'd hear the soft door of the tiny room lightly press open and I'd hear him call my name. Breakfast is ready. He needn't say it in a ring, like my mother said it to me; he merely would say it as a matter of fact. Choice. I would hobble up to the tall, tall counter, and grab my plate full of the savory breakfast (the only one I've ever enjoyed). But as we would eat together, I could feel a promise ensuing—today we were going to learn something as we did everyday, but what today?

It could have been simply loading up in his burgundy truck and searching for old dresses in yard sales. It could have been visiting JohnGray and Ruth and Tootie. But one day, on a day the June bugs buzzed and would fall to the ground and smoosh beneath your feet, and one day when the sun beat down on fallen fruits on the ground, and one day when grandma's pressure cooker whizzed and buzzed, we sat beneath a pear tree and he handed me a tiny, wooden hook and a cotton ball of twine.

Any other child, who hadn't grown up in the company of sages and mountains, would've thrown this down out of impatience, but I had been in a world apart from quickness, a world apart from computers, a world not modernized, not yet conquered, and I took the hook and he slowly taught me how to crochet. Careful, sunburnt, hairy white hands moved awkwardly with the hook, and then passed the tools onto me. Stitch one. I struggled. Stitch two. He smiled. Stitch three. Six years pass and I'm in middle school, throwing up every morning out of anxiety. Stitch four. I learn how to knit as well, and carry my love into a knitting club in high school. Stitch five. I am knitting my grandfather a red and navy striped chemo hat. Stitch six. He passes away. Stitch seven. I accidentally knit myself a pair of pink baby socks; they still are in my closet. Stitch eight. Pain drives me forward in a world where my chain-link paradise is lost to a new kind of fence: anxiety and mania. Stitch nine. I look into the mirror and realize that I have breasts and hips and I am a woman—it's the day I graduate. Stitch ten. I wake up, in a rattling dorm bed to this rhythm, the stitching, and I wonder where time goes to hide when you discover you enjoyed the moments you lived in.

This sound, this rhythm, perpetuating my curiosity, sustains my desire to learn and instills the belief inside of me that there is never a bad exploration, and that no matter what, impermanence is real. Time moves on, like the stitches on my lap. Time moves on, never to be unraveled like the velvety green bean vines that tug me back into these moments. Time moves on, but moments pass away like the sleepy dust that has settled on the plot of land that was my grandpa's garden. Time moves on, and I rest here, amongst the wispy brown cornstalks and the bone-dry hay, waiting for spring to come back again.

Kiyah Moore is a student at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. She grew up in Lenoir City, Tennessee—a rural, small town brought to its knees by factory closures during the recession. She is the aunt of nine children at the age of nineteen, and in her spare time she enjoys knitting, riding on the back of her father's motorcycle, working with children in Berea's community, and sinking her feet into her garden in her back yard. She is majoring in English and Education, and hopes someday to become a teacher, and to return home to her dog, Boots. 

Burnt Sienna

Sarah Robinson

“Wake up! Waffles are ready!” John appears next to my bed; his stuffed monkey clutched in the crook of his elbow like a ragdoll. I’d been waiting for him to wake me ever since the sun’s rays came peeping through my bedroom window.

“Is today Sunday?” I ask, sitting up. John holds the monkey to my face; makes it nod. I yawn as I push his friend away and hop out. “After breakfast, we have mass.” I scurry down the hallway after my brother, toward the sound and smell of sizzling bacon.

“By the time we get back,” he says, pouring syrup all over his plate, “Dad’ll be in the workshop.” Dad never attends church with us. ‘Pray for me,’ he always says. He spends Sundays making things, and drinking glasses of bourbon.

“I’m gonna see if I he’ll let me use his measuring tape,” John says. He just wants to see how much taller he is than me. Finishing the last bite, he takes a gulp of milk and wipes his white mustache away with his hand.

He may be fourteen months older, but we’re equals. Mom and Dad have four other kids, and we’re the youngest; we band together like teammates. Mostly, he lets me lead. Especially after last Easter, when he got us both in big trouble, after suggesting we load up all the pastel, hard-boiled eggs—the ones Mom had made from scratch--from a platter on the kitchen table. We filled our jacket-pockets with the entire dozen. Mom was washing dishes with her back turned when we hauled them outside to crack-off their shells.

One-by-one, we threw the sticky eggs at our brick house, as high as we could, just to see if they’d stick. Oh, they stuck alright. Once we were discovered, our brother Phil had to get up on the tallest ladder Dad has, and scrub away the mess.

“Go straight to your rooms, right this minute!” Mom scolded, her arm out-stretched. “There’ll be no Easter dinner for either of you,” she added. Our time-out was worse than a switch or a spanking. The scent of ham, potato casserole and homemade rolls wafted down the hallway. In the future, I’d have to take charge.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dad’s shop isn’t exactly a basement; more like an over-sized root cellar he and Phil dug out when our house was built, when Mom was still expecting me.

Once we enter the windowless room, it takes me a minute for my eyes to adjust. Maybe that’s why Dad always keeps the door open to the outside.

The floor is as tight as cement, packed-down from Dad’s size-eleven work shoes. At 6’3” he has to duck a bit as he moves about. We don’t dare get a toe in his way when Dad goes across the room, searching for something in a shadowy corner. He picks up what looks like a ruler from some shelf. He sits down on a low stool at his plywood table and goes to work sharpening a saw with the ruler-thingy. The shop air is cool; the hard ground glistens in reddish-brown, Virginia clay. It leaves a stain on the bottoms of our bare feet, like the burnt sienna crayon in my Crayola box. John searches for the measuring tape while I stand still watching Dad tighten a bare lightbulb. It hangs straight down from a black wire attached to a hook in the dirt ceiling. My brother loses interest in the tape when he can’t figure out which end to start with, or how it even works, so we wander back outdoors, leaving Dad to tinker all by himself.

It’s an Indian summer’s day, dry and sticky, with no rain in sight. I fill my short pockets with black-walnuts in their shells, gathering them from underneath our gigantic tree. Then I find a white rock that can act as chalk, and make a hop-scotch board on the driveway. I hop on one foot, drop a walnut shell into a square, and turn to pick it back up, never once losing my balance. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice Dad leaving his shop. My “Fun with Dick and Jane” reader page comes to mind, the one with the dad mowing the lawn.

“Away I go,” said Father.

I spy him a few minutes later, walking back into his cave with a drink. I plop down in the middle of the driveway, and black walnuts spill out of my short-pockets. I need Dad’s hammer to break open the shells, but I hesitate when I hear the screeching buzz of his electric sawblade, and see sawdust flying out the door like a swarm of gold gnats.

“Look, oh, look. See them go.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The next time I see Dad shuffling down the yard, he’s freshened his drink again. Maybe he’ll give me a sip. But he stops to make a funny face when he sees me staring. I giggle when he juts out his chin, using his tongue to pop out his false teeth. His bottom dentures hang at the end of his lips like they’re gonna fall out. Then he sucks them back in, but not before I spy the shiny pink plastic underneath his fake teeth. John and I laugh as we pull at our own teeth, but they won’t budge. As he ducks back into his shop, Dad whistles a tune, and we file in behind him like we’re following the Pied Piper. When he sets down his drink after taking a big swig, the liquor is the same burnt sienna as the shop floor.

John’s and my eyes light up when we realize Dad’s latest project is making us a Santa Claus: a life-sized, mechanical, battery-operated, super-hero! He will rock side-to-side and wave to our neighbors every Christmastime from his perch on the side of our house.

John and I stand on tiptoes, watching Dad concentrate. He applies a generous stream of wood glue across the middle of Santa’s red suit, then affixes a trim piece of plywood, tightening a vise around the jolly old man. Every rotation by Dad’s thick, strong hands is precise: turn, turn, turn…not too tight.

Waiting to see the finished Santa is like waiting for Christmas Eve, so we head to the house and wash up for quick peanut butter sandwiches.

Back outdoors, a not so itsy-bitsy spider, a Daddy Longlegs, crawls up the back of my brother’s white undershirt. I’ve seen hundreds of them, so I just reach up to wave the spider off. But when John feels my fingers brush his back, he turns around, following the Daddy’s path as it high-steps along the yard on its own stilts.

“Don’t lose him, he’s mine!” John yells, picking up the weightless creature and mimicking him. John high-steps out into the field, letting the bug crawl up his hand, and smiles as it tickles the hairs on his arm. When he finally flicks it off, John finds a long stick like the switch Dad sometimes uses on the back of our legs. Scratching it along the driveway, John pesters a wooly caterpillar, coaxing it out of a crack. But the creature doesn’t like the switch either, so he curls up, refusing to play with us. We run back into Dad’s cave to check on Santa’s progress.

He stands frozen, propped up against the wall next to a fan slowly drying his glue. The piece of wood scrap has become his belt: Dad’s already painted it black, with a silver buckle. Loose arms and legs on hinges will be attached like real joints. Dad grabs a hammer off the shelf, and with a ping…ping…ping, taps the hinges into place.

By late afternoon, Dad has made countless trips indoors. When he returns the last time, the sun is low in the sky. His lower lip is swollen, but no drink this time. Just a can of Zippo lighter-fluid, the one he usually keeps under the kitchen sink for filling his and Mom’s cigarette lighters. I don’t think much of it when he holds the can in one hand, a stick with a rag wrapped around it in the other, and staggers to the base of the black walnut tree. He reaches up with a lit torch, catching a branch with a big worm nest on fire.

A gust of wind catches my attention, blowing up dirt in every direction. The unexpected air current clips-off the dead branch, along with the cluster of white cobwebs, the ones with sizzling worms. When I look up, the leaves on the black walnut tree have sprung to life, clapping their hands like tambourines. The breeze coaxes the leaves to become partners in a fiery, autumn hoedown. I hold still, shielding my eyes with my bent arm from a sudden assault of smoke, but it finds its way up my nose. I pull my t-shirt up over my face, and run towards the driveway.

Moments later, adults come running outside screaming, “The field’s on fire!” I smell lighter-fluid, and spy flickering embers like daylight fire flies. Maybe Dad should’ve picked a calmer day.

John and I obey Mom’s voice, urging us toward the house. We run with our heads turned back toward the spectacle: pop-up blazes light new fires along the dry reeds in the open field, the one we run in with our friends when we play cowboys and Indians. The fires play Leap Frog above our favorite hill, the one we sled down in winter.

Mom unwinds the garden hose and pulls it taut to the back yard. Is she crying? Neighbors come running with pails.

“Over here!” someone shouts. People form a line from a neighbor’s water spigot. Ours is at full throttle. Buckets-to-hands, hands-to-buckets; turn and pass them quickly to the next person, like a game of Hot Potato. Mighty small buckets for such a big fire.

In the distance, a screeching siren rings out. In minutes, a gigantic red fire truck pulls into Lebanon Manor, sounding like my whiny cry, over and over again. It barrels up our gravel road where our old dog had been lying. Willie lazily got up, and moved in the nick-of-time!

“Run, Spot, run!”

John and I stay indoors at the picture window as the firemen smother the last of the flames and rewind their hoses. By nightfall, everyone returns home.

Mom says it was a “close call,” but Dad is awfully quiet. All that’s left of the field is a wet, smoky expanse of charred sticks. But our yard, the house, and all of us remain unharmed. Santa is still intact. And we all survive, even the black walnut tree, from what I remember.

Sarah Robinson's works reflect her recovery from the effects of alcoholism and sexual abuse, and reflect a restorative work in her once-broken heart. Her writings have been published since 2009 in newspapers and magazines: Outside Bozeman Magazine; WV Living Magazine; Morgantown Living. Grand Prize winner: Greater Greenbrier Valley Foundation Poetry Contest, 2010. HM: WV Writer’s contest, 2012. Diner Stories Anthology, 2014. Madwomen of the Attic Anthology, 2014. “The Skinny” Poetry Journal, July 2016.