forest during sunset

New Story at Fairytale Review!

The first time that the trees began to walk, Mae wore pink onesies and couldn’t yet talk. She lived with her mother at the end of the road, and they had two trees that lived with them.

One was a big gray maple called Old Mother. She had a scratchy beard of moss that grew on the side of her head. The other was Long Branch, but he was young and thin and angry dropping prickle-pods to hurt her toes.

When the trees came by in a parade, at all hours of the night and day, Mae sat at a desk and learned the colors of their leaves and the sounds of their names. Dogwoods with pale white faces, and birches walking on their roots like ballerinas in striped tutus. Saplings slithering, dragging their stumps along the ground, garden snakes in the grass. Oaks traipsed by, still in their tire swing and tree house work clothes. From the mountains, whole forests of trees wearing their red and orange party dresses, their leaves rustling with stories of the dance.

 


About Wendy

Wendy Dinwiddie is a queer Appalachian writer, editor, and educator. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alabama, where she served as the managing editor of the Black Warrior Review.


More by Wendy:


“His skin was green, not golf course green or lawnmower green, not state highway green…”

Puddles: Short Fiction

“As far as we know, the state bird of Alabama is Jamie Woods, forty-seven-year-old divorcee who works part time at the One Stop Laundromat…”

The State Bird of Alabama: Short Fiction

“I never lived in my father but I heard there’s a hole in him where he shot a black snake clean in/ two with the pistol he keeps on his collarbone…”

my father as the house where I never lived: poem


UPCOMING WORKSHOPS:

FLASH FICTION FOR HOARDERS
with the Chattanooga Writer’s Guild

In “Flash Fiction for Hoarders,” we won’t be cleaning out our closets or listening to Marie Kondo. We’ll instead spend our time reading zany flash dense with character development, symbolism, and memorable settings. In the past, we’ve read work from writers like Kim Addonizio, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Cathy Ulritch. We’ll write, share our work, and brainstorm narrative strategies for packing our flash to the rafters, despite its 1000 word limit. Minimalists beware. Hoarders, reinforce those foundations and get ready to pack the words in.