For a long time, I lived in my childhood—first as a child, then for many years after. I sat on the back patio and spit watermelon seeds into the grass where the snakes soaked up the sun. My mother made pies with rhubarb from the garden, the stalks softening as they baked in cups of sugar, the crust hot and sweet. My father mowed the lawn, whirling across the ground until the yellowjackets belched from below in thick black clouds. At night, peepers sang in the puddles. Panthers traveled along secret corridors up and down the mountain. At the bottom of the hill below the driveway, crawfish lurked in the creek. Once I found a baby mole near the lilies of the valley by the mailboxes, its mother nowhere to be seen. I held it in my palm, its tiny paws pink and grasping. A plastic cup with dirt and grass at the bottom made a terrarium. I dropped in bits of food that went uneaten, tipped water from a bottle cap into the well of its mouth, dug a grave in the lilies of the valley when its little form went stiff. I remember driving through the farm near my house, the weathervane on the farmhouse roof a brass horse rearing toward the future, the stream by the cornfield that engulfed the road during heavy rains. I remember the black dog that rushed from the dark at the side of the road as I rounded a bend. My car slid on the pavement, spun. When it stopped I was looking back in the direction I’d been coming from. I was empty and light as those days on the hilltop across from my house, my chest lifting toward the mountains and the sky beyond, mouth open to drink the wind.
JR Fenn is from the Central Appalachians. Her writing has appeared in many journals, including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and 100 Word Story. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University, where she won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction. She teaches at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.