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Molly Dumbleton

Row of Stones


          Artie was only six when Father died. The task of running the farm had fallen to Mother, who had, without blinking, hired the job out to a set of men who were broad-shouldered and loud-talking, and who blocked the doorway to Father’s workshop, which is where the best pencils and glue and shoelaces had always been kept, and where Father’s tools still hung, and where, for just a little while longer, the air would still smell like dog food and wet shoes and hot metal.
          Artie was twelve when Mother died, and this time the farm went to Gina, who said she’d had enough of strangers running things around here already and shooed the men out, right behind Mother’s body. In their place came a rotation of high-schoolers whom she invited up to the house for pizza after their shifts, and for whom she wrote college recommendations, and with whose fathers and older brothers she flirted.
          In the end, she'd landed a husband this very way, and so, on the evening of the wedding, after Gina was toted away drunk and elated in the passenger seat of an oversized pick-up truck, eighteen-year-old Artie sat on the front porch until the sun went down, watching the sheep moving cautiously through the pasture, and the fireflies beginning to flicker.
          He went inside, warmed the casserole that Gina had left him, ate it, washed his plate and fork, hand-dried them the way Mother had always said that he must, and put them back in the antique maple hutch where they belonged.
          Then he went upstairs and looked into his parents’ room, with its musty drapes and twin beds, and into Gina’s bright-painted room from the hallway. And when it was late enough, he climbed into the twin bed he’d slept in every night of his life, in the smallest of the house’s three bedrooms. He pulled his quilt up tight under his chin, turned out the light, and waited for his eyes to adjust. But the dark was darker than it had ever been, and tonight it stayed dark and didn’t yield. The house around him held its breath, cold and empty, with only his one body inside it, breathing in and out, afraid of tomorrow.

          In the dark, Mother came to him first. Upright in her favorite chair—a fancy chair for a farmhouse, everyone agreed: dark mahogany with carved legs and candy-cane striped silk. The version of Mother who had stung the back of his neck with a ruler if he tracked mud into the house on his boots, or was too slow at his reading, or cried when a fox mauled the chickens. And the other version of Mother, too: the near-skeleton, slumped in a soup-stained nightgown, barking harlot at Gina as she walked past carrying trays of food and baskets of laundry, and hissing retard at Artie when he tiptoed past empty-handed.
          Artie thought about the dead. About Mother and the green hill not far from here where she was buried, and Father’s body buried beside her.
          Father. Father had taken him fishing. Trusted him to use the toaster. Taught him, allowed him to climb trees. Held out his arms, for Artie to jump.
          Maybe a dog, Artie whispered to the dark. A big muddy-pawed shedder, like Father used to have, before Mother said No more, those dogs were soiling her upholstery. He could let a dog come inside the house. Lick the dinner plates. Come upstairs, even. Sleep in his room.
          Artie turned over in his bed and looked out the window. Joonie, the last one had been. Artie and Gina had liked riding in the back of Father’s truck with Joonie, and throwing her rubber ball as far as they could.
          He sat up and went down the hall to his parents’ old room, and opened his father’s dresser. He pulled a pair of Father’s overalls on over his pajamas, found a flashlight downstairs in the workshop, and went out and across the field to the grassy space behind the barn, where a row of stones marked the line between a thin-mown tractor path and a thicket of wild grasses.
          A long line, ending with Joonie. He sat and patted the last stone, and missed Joonie so suddenly it felt like a cannonball hitting his chest, and he wished everything around him weren’t dead.
​
          A square-shouldered shadow sat overlooking, and Artie lifted his flashlight. Up to its ears in grasses sat the old heavy-fendered truck. Artie could still hear it rumble.
          He pushed through the grass, tugged at the driver’s-side handle until the rusted hinges moaned open, and climbed in. The seat was still set way back, the way Father had it, and the vinyl seats creaked the same old way. Artie turned off the flashlight and waited for the night noises to pick up where they had left off.
          After a day of fishing, at the top of the long road back into the farm, his father’s long, narrow hand had swept across everything Artie could see, from one end of the dashboard to the other, and then reached out the window and patted the roof of the truck.
          “These are your fields, you know,” his father had said. “Your land, your sky, Artie. Even the moon belongs to you.”
          Artie stretched his legs all the way out into the long, empty space in front of him and tilted his head back against the seat.
This truck, sleeping here in the grasses, watching over. Those thick shadows, shifting expectantly in their enclosure. Those fields, pulsing with light. All of these lungs, here together, being alive. 







--
Molly Dumbleton’s short fiction has appeared in journals including New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, and Witness, and been honored with First Prize for the Columbia Journal Fiction Award, the Seán Ó Faoláin Story Prize, and the Dromineer Literary Festival Flash Fiction Award; Third Prize for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and Bridport Prize; and Finalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Award, Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Award, Smoke Long Quarterly Flash Fiction Award, and others. She is a reader for The Masters Review and a member of the Curatorial Board at Ragdale, and writes and teaches in the Chicago area. Full publications list and other info can be found at www.moliadumbleton.com.

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  • Home
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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