The Witch's Orchard

by Archer Sullivan

People in cities—living, working, talking at a fast clip—experience the quiet, slow pace that permeates these communities, and they assume a slowness of mind, a lack of character.

It’s a quieter life. Slow and contemplative. The kind of life I’ve never had. The kind that’s better imagined than lived. At least for me.

Just like real stars, they go on shining whether we’re here to see them or not.

He was not ready to meet his Lord and Savior.” “Are any of us?” I ask.

“Does chaos just happen to follow you around or do you invite it along for rides in that ugly clunker of yours?”

“It happens,” she says. I do not know what, precisely, “it” is. And yet I can feel it. Can feel the shape of it. The heaviness. “It,” whatever “it” is, is a thing that women know of. A thing we all carry. A decision. A gift. A burden. A chance. A mistake. A choice.

“Grief has a way of sneaking up on us, reminding us how powerful it is, even after a very long time.”

But I told her there is no shortcut through grief. There is only one road, and it is a long one.

No woman stays with a man who is bad every moment of every day. They always stay for the good moments that happen in between. They bask in the shimmer of dappled sunshine that appears between the storms. They weather everything else.

I look down at my own hands. They are the hands I’ve always had, and they are also my mother’s hands, my granny’s hands. They have peeled apples and fired guns and held children and thrown punches and turned the pages of book after book after book. My hands. My mother’s hands. My granny’s hands. Will they become a mother’s hands once more? Will I pass them down the line?

Sometimes, it’s the calm that comes after the storm that’s the hardest. When there’s nobody left to fight, nothing left to find, no one left to save.

His story had not ended happily. But, also, it had not ended at all. Merely changed direction.