Unloaded Volume 2_More Crime Writers Writing Without Guns by Eric Beetner

Author:Eric Beetner [Beetner, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781946502599
Amazon: 1946502596
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Published: 2018-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

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Outlaws

Lori Rader-Day

Two days after starting the move, Tess, her mother, and her sister, Sam, were driving the last of their things from the old house to the new one when Tess’s mother slowed the car and skidded into the gravel next to the highway.

“There it is,” she said. She flicked her cigarette ash out the window and pointed. She had long fingers. Piano-playing fingers, she said, as though someone else said it first. Tess wasn’t sure if her mother had ever touched a piano. “Right there. The most perfect tree in the world. My tree.”

There were trees all along the side of the highway and along the other side four lanes over, too. This one stood alone, growing up against a farmer’s barbed fence at the edge of an empty field. Skinny, not so tall. But Tess knew why her mother had chosen this tree above all others—it had a crown of leaves, perfectly round, like a halo. Her mother pulled back onto the road, the trees rushing by faster and faster until Tess’s eyes hurt to try to single one out. She watched them blur into each other, wondering if the trees stood too close to the fields’ fences, if they didn’t somehow grow into the wire. If, over time, the trees didn’t swallow the barbs and forever after live with biting metal under their bark.

Tess’s sixth grade science teacher had told them last month about how nature adapted, how weeds and grass wouldn’t stop growing even where they weren’t wanted and how a drip-drop of water would put a hole in anything over a long time, including rock, including the earth. “Nature wins,” Ms. Sheffield said. “Nature always does exactly what it wants, and it always wins.” Tess waited for one of the other kids to raise a hand and ask about humans—weren’t they nature, too? They didn’t always win. Lightning, remember? Say a human and a bear meet up, she’d wanted to say.

Or say nature meets a car, like it did so many times on the road to the new house. The new house, which was really an old house, was far out in the country, surrounded by five apple trees. When they had pulled into the driveway the first time, the tires smashed the knotty apples to pulp, adding a fresh layer to already-rotting fruit. They got out of the car, and Sam crouched low over a crushed apple and started to cry. The air smelled of vinegar.

“Did you see the leaves on my tree, Sam?” their mother asked over her shoulder. “A little baby oak. Like one of those pictures you draw for Mama.”

They were both too old to draw suns with smiling faces peeking around round-topped trees—Tess was twelve and Sam was eight—but Sam still did. She brought them home from her special class and their mother put them on the fridge with a magnet. Or at least she had in the old house. In the new house, the rules weren’t decided. There were boxes in all the hallways and stacked next to the doors.

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