Hive Ave Fall2024 - Flipbook - Page 47
Hive Avenue Literary Journal
through a tangle of tense years that came later. The memory
burrowed into Patty and followed her to adolescence. It sparked
a number of arguments between them. Beth kept silent during
these arguments, though she’d often felt defensive of her
mother. She imagined herself one day summoning the strength
to raise her voice at her sister. In the daydream, they all sat
cross-legged in the grass, shucking corn. As the years stretched
on and the rift between her sister and mother only grew, Beth
escaped into her daydream again and again. With each imagining, she whittled her script—an arrowhead coaxed painstakingly from a block of wood. With each argument she witnessed,
Beth inched closer and closer to a breaking point. Her head rang
with the words she’d soon shout: doesn’t art change the realities of life with each creation? And doesn’t our mother’s stitching strike you as art? And anyway, how could you actually think
the beauty of roses would come without cost?
3
Beth’s outburst came on a day shivering beneath a
clouded sky that dropped chilling rain in intermittent drizzles.
Mrs. Bellton directed the sisters to wind along each row, back
and forth, each following their own half of the sprawling garden.
The girls, one taller than most of the plants and the other just
taller than her, crouched to patrol the rows, each armed with a
sharp and narrow spade. They passed by the sundrop yellow of
cucumber 昀氀owers, deep reds and purples of ripening tomatoes,
brilliant orange marigolds huddled around the vegetable plants,
deep green of the green peppers bowing their stems as they
increased in weight. As they patrolled the rows, the twins were
to aerate the soil around each plant that needed it. In addition
to a chore, it was an unnamed test.
The condition of tomorrow’s soil would tell Mrs. Bellton
which of her daughters remembered how to know if a plant
needed its soil aerated. If the work was completed correctly. She
struggled with doubt that both girls would succeed and worried
for the state of half the garden. She chewed on the inside of her
cheek, watching the twins weave among the leaves and stalks
out to the far reaches of the acre garden. Finally, she settled on
the thought that one day’s worth of rain would not be enough
damage to devastate. Nothing that her prize-winning plants
could not recover from, or that the three of them couldn’t 昀椀x
with a morning or few of work. So, Mrs. Bellton remained resolute in her lesson plan. If Patty did not succeed, as feared, Mrs.
Bellton would show her daughter how to repair the mistake
made to prevent it from happening again. Despite her expectation, Mrs. Bellton continued to hope, a the 昀氀ame of a tiny
tealight candle she tended to, carefully kept alive inside her.
When Mrs. Bellton’s plan fell into action, Patty did not
respond to correction with grace. The next morning, Patty
woke early and stepped outside before her mother. Looking
out across the acre garden, something heavy burned inside her
chest. On her half of the garden, though the rain had stopped
early in the previous evening, puddles of water pockmarked the
soil around the plants she’d been responsible for. She noticed a
Fiction
slight droop to the leaves of those plants. Some of them leaned
a bit to one side, as if something inside of them had slowly
started to soften.
By the time her mother joined her, standing unspeaking at her side in observation of the garden, Patty’s heartbeat
thundered in her ears. She didn’t fear for what her mother
would say—she knew what words would come her way like a
refrain. The shame Patty felt at her mistake quickly turned to
rage when she faced her mother’s gentle eyes. To Patty, they
seemed an empty kind of amused, tired like she had ful昀椀lled an
undesired expectation. And that is what Patty feared—not letting her mother down, but knowing that her mother had grown
to expect Patty to let her down.
4
At fourteen, even fourteen and four minutes, nineteen
seconds older than Beth, Patty wasn’t ready to face this realization of her fear. She exploded into argument. Mrs. Bellton had
expected Patty to react this way. She knew full-well that the
challenge of Patty’s teenage years was blossoming into e昀昀ect
and would likely only increase in intensity for some time. The
thought was enough to exhaust her. That morning, Beth walked
heavily to the door, knowing the argument was coming, fearing
for what would be said this time.
Beth hated the nasty things Patty said to their mother, and
the way Patty cried about what their mother said back hours
later, like she thought Beth would sleep through it. Sometimes
she dreamed about hitting Patty in the face, right in her open
mouth, to shut her up. Other times she wanted to crawl into
her sister’s bed and hold her while she wept. On those nights,
she often waited until Patty’s cries softened and breath evened
out, having cried herself to sleep.
That’s when Beth would cry, too. She thought about how
alone her mother must feel in her own room in the middle of
a bright night, unable to sleep, like Beth often found herself.
Sometimes, she worried her mother had swallowed all the pain
throughout her life in shards of glass. One day something would
happen and her mother would collapse to the 昀氀oor in a million
pieces, shattered.
Beth knew, deep down, Patty shared this fear. It was
something they’d talked about once, years ago, before the rift
between Patty and their mother had grown so wide as to separate her from Beth, too. Oftentimes Beth fell asleep, still trying
to decide if mothers and daughters and sisters were supposed
to break each other. She wanted to know, maybe more than she
wanted to decide for herself, what Patty would say. She could
guess, sure, but part of her refused to be the one to say it.
5
After such a night of tears and contemplation, Beth struggled to rest. She’d woken later than she planned and knew the
results of their mother’s unspoken test would result in a blowout argument since she failed to correct her sister’s work before
her mother had seen. She’d been slow to join her mother and
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