Hive Ave Fall2024 - Flipbook - Page 46
Fiction
Hive Avenue Literary Journal
Before I Turned to Stone
Logan Anthony
this is a fairy tale, maybe a tall tale.
that is, if you’d prefer to think of it that way.
you’ll each do what you want, right?
it’s not like i care—either way.
perspective won’t change anything.
not when this story comes from memory.
The seven narrow windows ran closely together in a meticulous pattern along one wall of the bedroom. Each deep walnut
frame bore a sill skirted with lace. From an angled view, they
all appeared di昀昀erent sizes. Straight on, however, the windows
lined up perfectly to form a triangle.
This happened to be the view from the opposite wall
where a pair of twin beds stood with their headboards pushed
together to face opposite sides, north and south. Each afternoon, the windows worked together, letting slices of light in to
paint the three-pointed shape over half of each bed in honey-thick sunlight. Some nights, they permitted a comfortable,
pale shade of moonlight to lie over half of each sleeping twin.
Always, the moon crept in on tiptoes, spilling gently over
the sills. Always, its work was best completed in silence.
In this room, the Bellton sisters slept in their adjacent
beds, each curled beneath their own downy comforter tangled
with hand-stitched vines. Extra long stems intertwined with the
vines, 昀椀lled in with a deeper green thread. Upon those stems
stood pink roses. They towered above the rest of the greenery.
A rough-hewn caterpillar hid among the vines. On the second
blanket, Mrs. Bellton considered leaving the caterpillar out.
Wishing to keep the blankets as identical as possible, she chose
to include it. Her second attempt did not yield much improvement. Her girls didn’t notice the mistakes. Even years later, she
herself struggled to ignore them.
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As the toddlers became young children, they grew to
cherish their blankets. One of them quietly developed a 昀椀xation on something else about her mother’s design: if you
squinted closely, you found that Mrs. Bellton had stitched
the roses absent of thorns. It was this exact reason that Patty
Bellton-older-by-four-minutes-and-nineteen-seconds—as
she always introduced herself—blamed her mother for her earliest memory of pain and struggled to forgive her as the years
passed by.
When Mrs. Bellton’s twins were around the age of four or
昀椀ve, she began taking Patty and Beth outside with her each day
as she tended the garden and 昀氀owerbeds. It was with this work
Mrs. Bellton provided the majority of her family’s diet. With
her husband long gone, she supplemented the garden foods by
trading some of her bounty for a neighbor’s hunted meat from
the surrounding woodlands. That early morning, the air hung
crisp and fresh above the dew-dappled plants. Mrs. Bellton
intended to instill into her young daughters the 昀椀rst teachings
of her—their—garden’s work. Within minutes of watering the
roses that huddled near the house tucked in a bed of mulch
beneath the girls’ windows, Patty grabbed one by the stem. She
watched blood rise to the surface, beading up to collect in the
palm of her hand. Her shrill wet cries sliced the air like a blade.
Mrs. Bellton rushed her girls inside. Beth watched, lip
trembling, as her mother cleaned and bandaged Patty’s wound.
Mrs. Bellton decided she’d wait a season to start her girls’ education on the fall garden when the work was lighter and less
dangerous. The previous night, the girls had buzzed with excitement. They hardly slept, awakening grumpy and impatient. Mrs.
Bellton knew her girls—being overtired made them quick to
anger or upset. That morning, she’d only started them with the
rosebed because it was closest to the house.
Mrs. Bellton explained this to Patty countless times
