Published in Issue 63.3: Summer 2024
You can purchase our Summer issue here.
We worshipped her, sitting like obedient dogs at the base of her dress made
of coquina. Our father stole bricks from a fort we visited on vacation. She
could not bend down to help us, and it appeared as though she had no face,
even though we knew that couldn’t be true. We knew she had risen from
the limestone beneath the sand of Florida, had made herself into a woman.
But then came the skirt of coquina, and then my father added more stones
to her torso, and then, after a car accident, her arms, although lined with
pearls, become walls of pebbles cemented together. She could no longer pick
us up from school in the car.
Once we asked our father to pile us on top of her head. After that she
stood with one arm holding us up there, each of us an additional weight she
had to balance. Her other arm, which was very long and flexible, was either
on her hip, washing clothes, boiling dead chickens, scrubbing the toilet, or
ironing my father’s clothes. Of course, holding six weights on her head was
impossible, and we fell into the woods.
My father moved her face and embedded it into the fireplace mantle
so that we could worship her every day. She could not speak when he left
the house. If we saw the two of them together, it would have only been that
once, when we were on vacation in the mountains, the two of them leaning
against the back of the station wagon. For pretend, my father put his arm
around her. She crossed her frightened arms and dreamed of a ship in the
distance behind her.
Purchase our Summer 2024 issue, available in print and digital forms.
Terry Ann Thaxton has published three poetry collections, Mud Song, Getaway Girl, and The Terrible Wife, as well as a textbook, Creative Writing in the Community: A Guide. Two of her poetry books have been awarded a Florida Book Award. She’s published essays and poetry in New Letters, The Missouri Review, Chattahoochee Review, Pithead Chapel, CALYX, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.
