When We Become Ours by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung

Author:Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Truffles (or Don’t Worry, the Dog Will Be Fine)

by Eric Smith

I’m in the barn again. Why do we even have a barn?

Thick stalks of hay dig into my thighs from the bale I’m sitting on, pinching at my skin no matter how much I shift my weight. My jeans might be thick, but my skin has never been. I know that much about myself. Heart on my sleeve and all that . . . I’m living my life like an emo song mistakenly dropped on a country music playlist.

I close my eyes, inhaling and exhaling, the simultaneously sweet and stale and wet smell of the farm enveloping me. The straw, the earth, the autumn leaves, and the lingering scent of burning barrels full of them somewhere in the distance. The smell is comforting, even as I’m wildly aware of the fact that I fit in here just about as well as this barn does.

I don’t.

My parents farm blueberries. Yet we’ve got this barn with stables and hay, as if horses are one day going to sprout up out of the soil. Uncle Morris has a barn on his property, and Dad just had to get one of his own. At least, that’s the story Mom tells whenever she has someone come by to clean the thing. It mostly sits empty.

Why is there even hay in here?

I grip the bale of hay, hot tears streaming down my cheeks.

It’s all just . . . playing pretend. The barn. The stables with no horses. The hay that no one is going to eat, save for the mice that probably live in it. None of it fits, but it feels like it’s supposed to. Like I’m supposed to. Like everyone wants me to while simultaneously pointing me out. The adopted brown kid with the white country family. I couldn’t be a needle in a haystack if I tried. I’m like a pitchfork someone tossed in there—obvious, different, and jutting upward.

The hay jabs into my palms, and I let go, shaking my hands as I grit my teeth.

I exhale.

This Thanksgiving was supposed to be different. The last one before I leave for college next year. Before I’m across the country in Oregon, in a place where traveling back to South Jersey for the holidays is a costly impossibility. No more awkward, quick looks from cousins as they grow old enough to understand, or whispered chatter among aunts and uncles who are old enough to know better. No more unspoken questions that color the eyes of every new friend or boyfriend or girlfriend who arrives on the scene, just quick enough to disappoint me and leave their name forgotten at the next get-together.

Doesn’t matter how fresh the damn cranberries are around here. I’m not coming back, and I sure as hell have no plans to spend another Christmas or Easter or St. Patrick’s Day at Aunt Melinda’s cranberry bog a few miles down the road.

“It’s a farm!” she insists.

It’s a red fucking swamp, Melinda.

I just wanted a good Thanksgiving.

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