She Grew To Hate The Winter
The Story Room - Fiction
Call for Heroines is moving to a 3-lane publication.
This is Fiction — a small free part of The Story Room (exciting news on Tuesday, stay subscribed to get the deets). Fiction includes short stories and novel excerpts. The other lanes: Journal Prompts & Reframes (what you’re used to, free) and Midlife Elsewhere (paid). Read what calls to you, skip what doesn’t. You’ll always see the lane marked in the subtitle.
They married quickly.
He was a widower with much to offer, a home, a farm, and the prospect of children, though there were none yet.
It was summer. Her father, after a night spent at the saloon, reeking of stale beer and staler cigars, had asked her to join him on a stroll to the old basswood tree, the one with the red scarf tied around a lower branch to mark the best path through the neighboring forest.
It was an odd request, so she looked to her mother as she rose from the breakfast table. Her mother had tried to disguise her swollen eyes with an excess of the expensive powder her father bought on his rare expeditions to the city. She’d nodded. Go ahead.
“He’s a good man for you,” her father told her as he picked bark from the trunk of the old tree and tossed it into the moist and mossy forest of their farmland. She was seventeen and full of hope. As the wooden cart crossed the state line, she wept, not having realized her future life would be so far away. But her new husband pulled her to him and held her firmly beneath his arm as they bounced their way across the Iowa plains.
Night had fallen when they arrived. The inky black hid the isolation. No sprawling forest, no mossy trees, just miles of dry, struggling wheat. They lived a simple life in the humble two-room farmhouse. She kept the floors swept and the skinny chickens fed. Once a month they traveled to the Saturday market in the closest town. He insisted they arrive early, which meant leaving the farm hours before dawn. “The best deals are at daylight darling. You don’t want there to be nothing left to dicker for.”
He was a good provider. The farm was a frugal master, but their pantry and bellies were usually full. Her father had been right. They were a reasonable match in every way but one. The children never came.
She grew to hate the winter. She hated twilight, and the rhythmic knocking of a boot on the door frame spilling mud and gravel onto the wide-planked floor. How many of his baths had she poured into that battered copper tub, her knuckles chapped to bleeding? Daily, she knelt to sweep up the remnants of the farm he’d dragged inside, hiking up her skirt to save her only dress from the wash, the gravel pressing into her bare knees. She’d pick it out later, out of sight, in the privy where it would leave red pitted holes in her pale skin.
She hated the orderliness of everything. The days stretched out before her, the tidy house mocking her idleness, yet giving her nothing to do. And the quiet. She hated the quiet; the soundless snow, the still air, the lack of conversation. He barely said a word to her now. He hauled grain and fixed fences. The work was backbreaking and unrewarding. She was uninteresting.
She grew to hate their futile coupling. His icy weight pinned her down like the infinite Iowa sky. His sticky, fruitless seed spilled from her as she dreamed of children, of summer.
More fiction soon, and the bigger picture for The Story Room lands Tuesday. Stay close.