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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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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025