Applesauce

Her family loves apples so despite the fight she carted off in a cardboard box the tree’s fruit. My family has applesauce in its veins, was what she told me. When I saw her there were cores littering her countertops, a pan boiling on the woodstove. Did she see the metaphor? Those gnarled branches over her head. I took her coring knife, though cut fruit was a present I would not be offering, not to my relations. Beside me she sliced another tree-gift. By stovelight our wrists flashed, the lines in them crisscrossing as we worked, tangling and yet not.

From Guest Contributor Colleen Addison

Mary Of Silence

From where she stood, she watched the blood soak into the hard, compacted earth. It was like watching water that has spilled from a glass onto the countertop evaporate in fast motion. Soon it would be as if the dark fluid had never been there, absorbed into this wasteland where it could serve no purpose.

Mary wanted to scream. But her voice had fled long ago. With no one willing to listen futility had eventually won out. The doctors called it aphasia.

So Mary watched her husband die. Here, freedom surely was a bitterness. Alone, she started walking towards sunset.