The Inosculation of Sarah

by Amy Barnes

Tanalee Youngblood

I laugh loud when Maude the tree is born to me, at the age of ninety-three or thirty-three, the years don’t feel like it matters or means anything. It is still far too late to count and I’ve given up counting the days and the months before she arrives. It’s the last time I laugh at anything. I’ve only biblically been with one man and that was from a distance, dissing him with the hissing laugh that I learned from my friend Lilith and that I adapt as my lungs harden to roots. Maude made me a mother, a maid from the wrong side of the tracks, tracking things in the wrong order, a first tree child then a marriage tree to nail on my front door like I am Martin Luther announcing the rules of motherhood to the neighbors that hover with their pickle forks and pitchforks and tiki torches and tiki masks. The child of my childhood hides in my capri pants until she is three, wrapped first around my ankle, then golden calf and thigh, finally nestling up against my hip, nesting next to the closed-up pockets. Her father is a tornado in another county. He’s leveled the same town and same woman three times in three years and plans to return the next time people close their eyes and ears, not listening to the sirens that wail and the sirens that draw strange men to homestead in my front yard. I wish I could give Maude a sibling called Sybill but Maude whispers no from inside my pant leg. She hides there to avoid living with her father the windstorm that has tried to blow her away. We both wear our hair in leaf feathers in the spring, a verdant pair, awake until the sky sets into autumn. In fall, I sell my soul to the devil to learn how to play the ukulele and teach her to sleep to music until Maude is as tall as me, intertwined against my breasts and face and hair and toes. We search the beach for hiding spots and lightning-turned sea glass which I turn into bottle green glass bottle glasses for Maude when the light hits her eyes for the first time. Her hurricane father with a New Orleans Hurricane drink which followed us a thousand leagues over the sea, lands over land over sea and tries to pull her away. I sandbag him and frantically dig a sand hole for Maude and I to grow in.

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Amy Barnes has words at FlashBack Fiction, Popshot Quarterly, X-RAY Lit, The Molotov Cocktail, Lucent Dreaming, Anti-Heroin Chic, Flash Frog, Janus Literary, Perhappened, Cabinet of Heed, Spartan Lit and others. She’s a Fractured Lit associate editor, Gone Lawn co-editor and reads for Narratively, Retreat West, NFFD, CRAFT and Taco Bell Quarterly. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and longlisted for Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021. Her debut flash collection, Mother Figures, was published by ELJ Editions in June. A full-length collection is forthcoming from word west in spring, 2022.