flash by hannah edwards
Mulberry Literary Fresh Voices Award Runner-up

Between a Fig, a Tree, and an Earthworm

(Inspired by the poem “Sanctuarium triptych” by Adam Hanford)

We’re all tamed now, notice how our teeth aren’t quite as sharp. We eat figs and local mushrooms, dandelion tea, hearts in our mouths and on our wrists and we sit on old broken desks from the tip three miles south.

We have friends with eyes like flickering light bulbs from a run-down convenience store. Some people catch it, some people don’t, but they’ll never get fixed. I open yours with my thumb and forefinger, stretch the skin to see—they’re always so bright; I fight the urge to shoot a breath just to see you squirm to blink, but you knock my hand and I suppose I should offer you a button mushroom instead. So, I did. The best I had and said it was your nose. You don’t like mushrooms? Have a fig. They’ve got a taste, the kind that will make your face scrunch, all earthy and no forgiveness. It’ll stain your tongue for hours—maybe that’s why I like them.

Afterwards, we daze, our toes touching, splayed out in the dirt to imagine the way our fingers curl and twitch, whispering how the worms are six feet under us inhaling great speckles of old life. Funny little things, because we wriggle just like them. We dip our hands in the earth, noticing how the leaves that go crunch are folded into the mass of our hair and our knees remain permanently red-raw from stray branches.

“Where’d y’get that bruise?” It’s the first thing you asked.

I don’t know or don’t care, ‘cause our skin’s meant to be touched. We climb trees and spit in our mouths, you think any of this makes sense? Hold a dagger to an animal and call it nature, eat its heart and call it sacrilege. 

Life just doesn’t puzzle together. I don’t say how the way you squish the grapes into wine is something sacred, something I get, your human experience drinkable in the way your fingertips graze my thigh; delicate, hallowed actions that struggle to mold themselves into my own limbs. I pretend not to melt to the dirt ‘cause of the way your tongue is honeyed like oak sap, and I swear we get drunk from it. Dizzy, squiffy, arseholed, hammered. I’m a better liar than you anyway, your pupils as large as conkers, but it’s no stranger that we’re easily tempted—it began with the trees after all, because what’s her name, the bible woman, Eve.

She knew what was up.

Now we grin, pick an apple and eat it up, our holy books aren’t written yet. Fingers peel the slices apart, the thin stem poking out for you to take—head down, palms pressed together, tongues like snakes because They don’t know yet. Consequence is as small as a seed in our hands, dance around it and swallow it whole—

In the snow we die anyway, the warmth of Eden long behind, so what’s the point in basking in spring if not for the sweet fruit of our labor.

Hannah Elizabeth is a first year illustration student from the Cardiff School of Art, from a small village of South Wales. She finds love in writing about the peculiar things and the whimsical.