An Acorns Flash Fiction Feature
By: Elowen Dovren
The shears tasted of dry rust and well-water. Maeve spat the grit onto the grey porch boards and wiped her chin with the back of her forearm, her sleeve catching on the coarse skin of her lip. At seventy-two, the November damp settled straight into her marrow, making her knees click when she stood.
Below her, Oconee County was drowning in green. Kudzu didn’t just grow here; it swallowed. It choked out the briars by breakfast, buried the rusted belly of the old John Deere by supper, and now, three soft, heart-shaped leaves were flexing through the split pine of her porch.
Maeve didn’t reach for the blades. Instead, she dipped her hand into the tin lard bucket at her hip, pulled out a fistful of crushed eggshells, and let them snow down around the shoots.
Calcium keeps the dirt sweet, Mae. Thomas’s voice was just a low hum in her inner ear now, dry as old corn silk. She smoothed the soil around the vine with two fingers, letting them sink until the cold mud caked beneath her fingernails.
Inside, the kitchen smelled of stale chicory and the cold iron of the woodstove. At the head of the table, Thomas’s blue-rimmed porcelain mug sat exactly three inches from the salt cellar. A crescent of grey dust had settled into the bottom of the glaze. For twelve months, she had swept around it. To move the mug was to carry it to the sink, and to wash it was to admit that no one was left to dirty it again.
A dry, papery scrape came from behind the plaster. Too heavy for a mouse.
Maeve followed the sound into the hallway where the wallpaper was peeling away in long, yellowed curls. Sprouting from a crack in the lath, a pale vine was reaching toward the
wooden peg where Thomas’s sheepskin coat used to hang. As she watched, the tip didn’t just grow; it swelled. It coiled back on itself, thickening into a flat, heavy disc.
Her ribs tightened. She pressed a thumb against the leaf-shape.
The cold hallway vanished. The skin of her face flared with the high, white heat of July 1974. The sharp stench of hot axle grease and crushed clover hit the back of her throat so hard she choked. Thomas was there, his shirt soaked through at the armpits, laughing as he pressed his silver Waltham watch into her palm. So you’ll always know the hour, Mae.
Maeve gasped, snatching her hand back. The hallway rushed back, dim and freezing. But her thumb still tingled where it had pressed the vein of the leaf.
By noon, the pruning shears were at the bottom of the eighty-foot well. She threw the window sashes wide, unlatched the back door, and sat down in the rocker to wait.
The green didn’t rush; it crept with an awful, quiet purpose. By Tuesday, the tendrils had looped around the legs of the oilcloth-covered table. By Friday, they were braided through the coiled springs of the mattress. Every time her bare skin brushed a leaf, the house filled with him. A touch against the doorframe brought the smell of his pipe tobacco; a step near the pantry brought the low, off-key rumble of him humming Old Rugged Cross over his morning shaving water.
She stopped lighting the stove. She stopped opening the tins of lard. She lived on well-water and the heavy, suffocating warmth of thirty years ago, watching the green twilight slowly seal the windows shut.
By the third week, the living room was a cave of soft, damp breath. In the corner, where Thomas’s corduroy armchair sat, the vines had matted into a thick, humped mass. It wasn’t a man—not truly—but the greenery had filled out the hollows of the cushion, rising into a broad, slumping torso that shifted slightly when the wind hit the eaves. Or perhaps it didn’t need the wind.
Maeve crawled toward it on her hands and knees, her skirts dragging through the wet mulch that now covered the pine floors.
“Thomas?” she whispered.
A wet, tearing sound came from the center of the mass as two leaves parted. A draft of air blew out of the dark split—but it didn’t smell like pine or tobacco. It smelled of ditch-water, stagnant ponds, and the sweet, rotten bottom of a silo.
“…exactly when…”
The voice was a rattle of dry husks. It had the rhythm of his speech, but the throat was made of fiber.
“…coming home… Mae… coming home…”
She leaned her weight against the green knee, reaching up to press her cheek where the chest should be. She wanted the wool of his shirt. She wanted the steady, boring thud of his heart.
The vine-mass heaved. Two thick, fibrous ropes slid over her shoulders, smelling of old graves. They didn’t hold her like a husband; they tightened with the slow, hydraulic pressure of a root system splitting a foundation. Black thorns, long as carpet tacks, punched through her cotton blouse, dragging lines of heat across her shoulder blades.
Below her, the floor-vines were already looping over her ankles, stitching her hem directly into the rotting floorboards.
The thing in the chair began to shudder violently. The leaves rhythmically clacked together, mimicking a sound she had spent a year trying to forget: the wet, rattling gasp of Thomas’s lungs filling with fluid in the county ward while the machines beeped in the dark.
“…coming… home… coming…”
It wasn’t a memory. It was an echo chamber that required her blood to keep humming.
The adrenaline was cold and thin, but it cleared the green fog from her head. Maeve didn’t scream; she had spent her life saving her breath for the work. She wrenched her right arm back, leaving two inches of skin behind on the briars, and dug into her apron pocket. Her fingers found the horn-handled paring knife—the small, hooked one she used for coring winter apples.
She didn’t try to stab the chest; there was nothing there but leaves. She drove the small blade horizontally into the split where the voice came from, sawing through the wet, stringy pulp until her knuckles hit the bark.
The creature didn’t cry out, but the pressure in the arms slackened as the sap ran black and thick over her hand.
Maeve dropped to the floor, her knees cracking like pistol shots in the enclosed room. She sliced through the tendrils at her ankles, her breath coming in ragged, shallow wheezes. She didn’t look back at the chair as the green mass began to slump sideways, losing its shape like melting tallow.
In the kitchen, the main taproot had lifted three floorboards, thick as a fence post and slick with white fungus.
She didn’t use the poker. She took the heavy, double-bitted axe from the wood-box by the stove. It took her three swings just to raise it over her shoulder, her old wrists trembling under the iron weight.
The first blow bit into the meat of the root, spraying her stockings with sour fluid. The second split it to the dirt. The third buried the blade into the earth beneath.
A long, slow sigh seemed to pass through the walls as the leaves dropped their water. They didn’t disappear. They simply died—turning the dull, grey-brown of winter silage, filling the kitchen with the ordinary, suffocating stench of rotting weeds.
The silence came back, but it wasn’t the heavy silence of an empty house anymore. It was just the quiet of November.
Maeve sat on the edge of the wood-box for a long time, watching her blood drip onto the dead mulch. Thomas’s mug was gone, buried under six inches of brown chaff. She didn’t dig it out.
After an hour, she stood up, her joints protesting the movement, and walked to the pump. She washed her arms until the water ran clear, then she found a broom. There was a lot of rot to move before sundown.
About the Author:
Elowen Dovren is an emerging writer whose work spans multiple genres and explores diverse perspectives. Her writing has been published in InterrobangLit and she also has work forthcoming in PinholePoetry. Currently, she is channeling her creative focus into a new collection of short stories. You can find her on Instagram at Elowendovren.writes and follow her updates.