Mary Alice Dixon

Issue 16

Flash Fiction

My mother collected beads. Worry beads. Bone beads. Beechnut, butternut, and bitternut beads. Made pregnant goddess beads from plum pits wrapped in seaweed. Buried her beads by the roots of the devilwood and wild plums growing near Sunset Beach.

“I’m feeding trees with my memories,” she said.

“Crazy witch,” the preacher pronounced. Said she threatened his flock with her made-up religion, the one that grew on the shore beyond his church.

“The trees remember. You’ll remember, too,” she told me, “when you branch in green and petal pink.”

Tonight as the strawberry moon rose full above the sea, my mother donned a floral nightgown stained with dirt. She cut flesh from a plum, kissed its skin, then laid the pit in a broken clam shell on her pinewood dresser. 

She picked up a small bundle of sage, what she called “salvation plant.” Holding the sage high, arms outstretched, my mother smiled. 

“Come ripening June, come strawberry moon, light this night,” she chanted. “Now nourish, now flourish my trees.” 

She lit the sage. She waved its smoke at the plum tree growing close by her window. The sage smelled green and light, like lime and silver thyme. Smoke streams drifted, then curled around the plum.

It was then I remembered I was once a child who held my mother’s hand. Her knuckles felt like beads of bone. I remembered my sisters. Their names were beechnut, butternut, and bitternut. I looked at my mother through the open window and I flowered.