Mulberries grow in deep pockets of my memories. The sepals turned fleshy and purple, tight as brains. As children, my brother and I made clubhouses in the mulberry shrubs on the campus where our father taught. Curtained and cool in the heat of the quad. My brother, who never made it out of childhood, believed the shrubs were time machines, taking us back to a time before sidewalks and cut lawns and flagpoles, before mail in the post office box and paninis at the campus cafe. He’d push the branches aside saying, “Come in. Seat yourself.” He was a fireman; I wore a beret and played the oboe; we were lost to time. Now years later, I’m a mother, and my brother truly is lost to time. My daughter and I make scones with the mulberries that drop from the two trees in our yard. Trees older and taller than our home, their fruit unreachable by human hands. At night, I sleep on pillow cases made from mulberry silk. And now that I have, there is no other way to sleep. I have mulberry silk roving for spinning yarn on my spinning wheel. It sits unspooled in a sweetgrass basket, waiting until my spinning skills are more practiced, more deserving of its luxury. In the mulberry time machine, my brother and I would eat the berries off the clubhouse walls. Our purpled fingers lost in a world of internodes and lenticels, veinlets and lobes. We’d completely vanish behind their weeping branches. Gone to some sweet dimension. The toothed edges of the leaves catching soft in our skin.
Lydia Gwyn is the author of the flash fiction collections: You’ll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, Midway Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Florida Review, New World Writing Quarterly, and others. A selection of pieces from her new collection “Emptiness, Standing Still” is available in Issue 22 of Ravenna Press’s Triples Series. She lives with her family in East Tennessee, where she works as an academic librarian.
Featured Artwork:
Coneflowers Near Memorial
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after rewarding career in public health research. With graduate degree from Howard University, in eight years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in nearly 200 journals on five continents. Photo publications include Alchemy Spoon, Barnstorm, Burningword, Camas, Feral, Invisible City, Phoebe, Stoneboat, Stonecoast, and Whitefish. Text-based photo-essays include Amsterdam Quarterly, Barren, DASH, Kestrel, Ilanot Review, Litro, NWW, Paperbark, Pilgrimage Magazine, Sweet, and Typehouse. He recently wrote/acted in a one-act play and appeared in a documentary limited series broadcast internationally. Jim and family split time between city and mountains.