Page 56 - Vol. VII #7

peg alforD purSell
ATpples for the Animals Tonight
he wind was blowing mightily when she went out at dusk to feed the pigs.
The heat of the house left her quickly. The first star was out there some- where, would appear. The heat of the house was fueled by their rationed fire- wood and his plentiful anger, her horrible husband, who had always been hor- rible, even when, at fifteen, she’d said yes, because there was no other option, because her mother had needed space for the newest child, Harold, another boy, another terror. The ground under her feet had thawed over the past week, but now was growing hard once again, and she stubbed her big toe, inside her thin rubber boot, against a frozen clod of dirt.
Darkness was coming fast. Behind her, the heat of the house awaited her, with her husband made more horrible by age. They were old now together. They’d always been together. He hadn’t seemed to see her back hunching day by day but now he saw, now he called her humpbacked in his hard voice, to shame her, to enrage her into changing what she could not.
The pigs in their pen snorted, sensing she was near, coming with her heavy pan of scraps. Peels and cores of apples the fare of the day. She’d put up jars
of applesauce and made and froze pies, and still the fruit cellar was piled high with apples, and still the trees in the orchard held ruined fruit frozen and thawed and freezing again. She didn’t care about the apples. She didn’t care that there were still potatoes in the garden. Or turnips, or beets. She didn’t care that spring would arrive some far-off day with its daffodils and its demands. The wind rose again, bringing the winter-iron smell of the freezing pond, where under the surface lived dying creatures, bodies twisting and warping to mark their progress.
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Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest, published by Dzanc Books in July 2019, and of Show Her A Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Indie Book of the Year for Literary Fiction, and featured by Poets & Writers magazine’s second annual 5 over 50. Her work has appeared in Joyland Magazine, Permafrost, Waxwing, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press and of Why There Are Words.