[Editors’ note: This post will be our final miCRo for this calendar year. See you in January 2020!]
Assistant Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: Amy Stuber crafts her story from the impossible language of motherhood. As trucks come to fell the dying ash tree in her yard, Stuber’s speaker sees many possible versions of her daughter appear. “I could lie down for death and have this on the screen playing and playing and playing,” she writes. Through an explosion of the idiom “empty nest” and a vocabulary that swings from tender to profane, Stuber asks: how can a mother survive knowing what the daughter must survive?
To hear Amy Stuber read her story, click here:
A Tree That May in Summer Wear
Before the city comes to cut down the dying ash tree in my front yard, all my daughter’s past and future selves present themselves on its branches. I know. It sounds ridiculous and magical, and I’m not one to fall for that shit, yet there they are posing, self-doubting, fucking, preening, eating, sleeping, birthing, parenting, dying.
The tree is between the sidewalk and the street, so technically not my front yard. It has a swing looped to metal chains under which we folded old jeans to protect the branch. The jeans are faded and slipping, and antagonistic-teenaged-daughter points it out: “Really, Mom? Really? Everything we do is patched together shoddily. I guess this shouldn’t surprise me, but still.” She has a forehead full of acne, but she’s covered it with powder so it’s a texture and not a color. I say nothing because I’ve learned it’s best not to engage with teenaged-daughter when she’s like this. “Of course,” she says, “Okay, great, that’s great. You’re just going to ignore me completely. Nice,” and then climbs behind a decaying squirrel’s nest where I can’t see her.
And then there’s mother-daughter, and she will barely look at me. I don’t know the new technology, which disgusts her. I eat too much and have gotten fat, which disgusts her. I chew ice, and how fucking dare I?
But the funny thing is that I can see grandmother-daughter, too, and she is just the same as me, futile and pointless and going the way of annuals someone has tried to overwinter in a pot in the attic, rangy, expecting too much and delivering little, ignored, so ha fucking ha, I want to say to mother-daughter.
Toddler-daughter comes out, and she has ribbons wrapped from her wrists to her elbows for decoration because the tulle costume and the seventeen necklaces were not adornment enough. She hates me. She loves me. She hates me. Food, shit, bath, sleeplessness, mess, sleep, cry, howl, scream, love, kiss, hands grasping neck, repeat.
Grown-daughter is by the river with a woman. They hold hands. They lean into each other. It’s like a goddamned romantic comedy but artsy, one you want to watch when you’re feeling up for something more than bake-offs and bachelors. I could watch this forever. I could lie down for death and have this on the screen playing and playing and playing.
When the city comes, it’s two trucks. Ash-borer disease. Nothing we can do, etc. The chainsaw starts up, and there they are, all my girls, all my women, buzzing, angry, vital, someone having kicked the nest. “Swing out, little girl,” I yell from the ground, cheering them on. This is what I’m here for. “Swing out, Sweetie.” Grandma. Mommy. Lovebug. Cunt. Honey. My love. Bring your best tornado. I can take it. I can’t. I can.
Amy Stuber‘s work has appeared in TriQuarterly, American Short Fiction, Passages North, Joyland, New England Review, and elsewhere. She’s an assistant flash editor for Split Lip Magazine. Find her on Twitter @amy_stuber_ and online at www.amystuber.com.
