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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
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  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
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    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
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      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
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      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
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    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022

Janice Lively

Dust Tracks

(For Ellawese)

            Perched on the edge of the porch, her arms wrapped around her thickening waist, Ellawese sat in the summer twilight gazing out at the dirt road. No cars yet. The wooden stairs warmed her bare feet. At fifteen, she still went barefoot every chance she got. Shoes hurt, were too confining, slowed her down.  Her mama often warned her, “You gonna get a splinter.” Ellawese ignored her. Her feet longed for other places. The ground hugging her restless feet promised to take her to see things beyond her mama’s porch, a field of black dandelions in Eden, three-eyed frogs in Inkwell, the coral caves in Mayweather.
            She looked down at her feet. They were starting to spread. Her mama had said it was from going barefoot. “It ruins your feet.”  Sapphire-blue nail polish glistened on her toes. She didn’t care much for makeup but always kept her toes polished in some extraordinary color. Other girls in Bogart, Alabama wanted jobs, husbands, and babies. She wanted something other than Bogart.  Most evenings, she and her mama sat and watched the dust rise from the road. Cars streaked past speeding to places too far for her to walk, stirring the red grit into vapors that dragged like shoe strings in the sky. Ellawese would whisper towards them, “Can I go.” They never stopped. Nausea stirred her stomach.  
            At the beginning of summer a gleaming red and white Chevrolet had stopped once. She had been walking down the road, her too tight shoes tucked under her arm, headed to Bad Water to see purple swans. She and mama had seen the Chevrolet on the road before. Her mama had said. “A car that color. Some fool woman bought him that car.”  Treasure Lee was eighteen. He saw Ellawese’s tangerine-colored toes and dusty feet then offered her a ride. Threw her shoes in the back seat alongside his. He drove barefoot. She told him she had walked to Attalla once. He had driven all the way to Chattanooga. She wanted to ride the Interstate, see the Coosa River, the Indian Falls. Satisfy her feet. “I’ll take ya’.” At the Falls he asked to rub her feet. “Will you take me to Atlanta?” Rocketing through the darkness on the way home, the Interstate lights in her eyes, she had put her feet out the window, pointed them to heaven and walked faster than she ever had, faster than the wind, so fast she was soon walking across the sky.
            The screen door banged against the casing when her mama came out on the porch and took a seat for their nightly watching. Ellawese glanced over her shoulder. Something quivered inside her, panted like butterfly wings then was still. She turned her eyes back to the road. In the distance a red and white car stirred up dusty clouds; the haze made it hard to see. The wood beneath her feet was cool now. She looked down at the flowers on her cotton dress. What would she tell her mama when her belly started pushing against her dress and the flowers appeared to bloom? She would say, “My shoes had been too tight.”




--
Janice Lively is a fiction writer and holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her fiction and creative nonfiction has appeared in the anthology The Thing About Love Is..., Hair Trigger, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Valley Voices: A Literary Review, among other publications. She lives in Chicago and teaches creative writing and literature at Elmhurst College,  where she serves as a faculty advisor to Elmhurst College's literary arts journal, MiddleWestern Voice.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
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    • Submit Here
  • Features
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  • Issue 22 Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Art Fall 2021 >
      • Bonnie Severien Fall 2021
      • Camilla Taylor Fall 2021
      • Guilherme Bergamini Fall 2021
      • Emanuela Iorga Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Poetry Fall 2021 >
      • Maureen Alsop Fall 2021
      • Annah Browning Fall 2021
      • Romana Iorga Fall 2021
      • Natalie Hampton Fall 2021
      • Sherine Gilmour Fall 2021
      • Adam Day Fall 2021
      • Amanda Auchter Fall 2021
      • Adam Tavel Fall 2021
      • Sara Moore Fall 2021
      • Karen Rigby Fall 2021
      • Daniel Zhang Fall 2021
      • Erika Lutzner Fall 2021
      • Kindall Fredricks Fall 2021
      • Cin Salach Fall 2021
      • Andrew Zawacki Fall 2021
      • Micah Ruelle Fall 2021
      • Rachel Stempel Fall 2021
      • Haley Wooning Fall 2021
      • Rikki Santer Fall 2021
      • Evy Shen Fall 2021
      • Suzanne Frischkorn Fall 2021
      • Danielle Rose Fall 2021
      • Eric Burgoyne Fall 2021
      • John Cullen Fall 2021
      • Maureen Seaton Fall 2021
      • Hannah Stephens Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Nonfiction Fall 2021 >
      • Kevin Grauke Fall 2021
      • Courtney Justus Fall 2021
      • Amy Nicholson Fall 2021
    • Issue #22 Fiction Fall 2021 >
      • Tina Jenkins Bell Fall 2021
      • David Obuchowski Fall 2021
      • Thomas Misuraca Fall 2021
      • Aiden Baker Fall 2021
      • Jenny Magnus Fall 2021
  • Issue 23 Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Art Spring 2022 >
      • Jonathan Kvassay Spring 2022
      • Karyna McGlynn Spring 2022
      • Andrea Kowch Spring 2022
      • Layla Garcia-Torres Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Poetry Spring 2022 >
      • Robin Gow Spring 2022
      • T.D. Walker Spring 2022
      • Jen Schalliol Huang Spring 2022
      • Yvonne Zipter Spring 2022
      • Carrie McGath Spring 2022
      • Lupita Eyde-Tucker Spring 2022
      • Susan L. Leary Spring 2022
      • Kate Sweeney Spring 2022
      • Rita Mookerjee Spring 2022
      • Erin Carlyle Spring 2022
      • Cori Bratty-Rudd Spring 2022
      • Jen Karetnick Spring 2022
      • Meghan Sterling Spring 2022
      • Lorelei Bacht Spring 2022
      • Michael Passafiume Spring 2022
      • Jeannine Hall Gailey Spring 2022
      • Phil Goldstein Spring 2022
      • Michael Mingo Spring 2022
      • Angie Macri Spring 2022
      • Martha Silano Spring 2022
      • Vismai Rao Spring 2022
      • Anna Laura Reeve Spring 2022
      • Jenny Irish Spring 2022
      • Marek Kulig Spring 2022
      • Jami Macarty Spring 2022
      • Sarah A. Rae Spring 2022
      • Brittney Corrigan Spring 2022
      • Callista Buchen Spring 2022
      • Issam Zineh Spring 2022
      • MICHAEL CHANG Spring 2022
      • henry 7. reneau, jr. Spring 2022
      • Leah Umansky Spring 2022
      • Cody Beck Spring 2022
      • Danyal Kim Spring 2022
      • Rachel DeWoskin Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Fiction Spring 2022 >
      • Melissa Boberg Spring 2022
    • Issue #23 Nonfiction Spring 2022 >
      • Srinaath Perangur Spring 2022
      • Audrey T. Carroll Spring 2022
  • Issue #24 Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Art Fall 2022 >
      • Marsha Solomon Fall 2022
      • Edward Lee Fall 2022
      • Harryette Mullen Fall 2022
      • Jezzelle Kellam Fall 2022
      • Irina Greciuhina Fall 2022
      • Natalie Christensen Fall 2022
      • Mark Yale Harris Fall 2022
      • Amy Nelder Fall 2022
      • Bette Ridgeway Fall 2022
      • Ursula Sokolowska Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Poetry Fall 2022 >
      • William Stobb Fall 2022
      • e Fall 2022
      • Stefanie Kirby Fall 2022
      • Lisa Ampleman Fall 2022
      • Will Cordeiro Fall 2022
      • Jesica Davis Fall 2022
      • Peter O'Donovan Fall 2022
      • Mackenzie Carignan Fall 2022
      • Jason Fraley Fall 2022
      • Barbara Saunier Fall 2022
      • Chad Weeden Fall 2022
      • Nick Rattner Fall 2022
      • Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow Fall 2022
      • Summer J. Hart Fall 2022
      • Daniel Suá​rez Fall 2022
      • Sara Kearns Fall 2022
      • Millicent Borges Accardi Fall 2022
      • Liz Robbins Fall 2022
      • john compton Fall 2022
      • Esther Sadoff Fall 2022
      • Whitney Koo Fall 2022
      • W. J. Lofton Fall 2022
      • Rachel Reynolds Fall 2022
      • Kimberly Ann Priest Fall 2022
      • Annie Przypyszny Fall 2022
      • Konstantin Kulakov Fall 2022
      • Nellie Cox Fall 2022
      • Jennifer Martelli Fall 2022
      • SM Stubbs Fall 2022
      • Joshua Bird Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Fiction Fall 2022 >
      • Otis Fuqua Fall 2022
      • Hannah Harlow Fall 2022
      • Natalia Nebel Fall 2022
      • Kate Maxwell Fall 2022
      • Helena Pantsis Fall 2022
    • Issue #24 Nonfiction Fall 2022 >
      • Courtney Ludwick Fall 2022
      • Anna Oberg Fall 2022
      • Acadia Currah Fall 2022