by Beth Gilstrap

You had beaten the cancer once, taken up the pink bunting of survivors, made it your whole personality—folks with borderline move through them like crabs through shells—unlike them, you’d never been bold in anything aside from drinking. They say hermit crabs get braver when they acquire high-quality shells and maybe that’s an answer to the roiling why because you never unpacked, not really, when you moved to the only house y’all ever had til the bank took it back. They say I come from a line of healers that stretches back to Scotland and that’s the word they use in circles where folks learn from haunted land and try to get by without healthcare. Weren’t many doctors around no ways. Not deep in Carolina in those days. Hell, Granny Viola, second youngest of seven, washed in leftover bathwater from all her siblings and parents besides and I don’t know, when I dug out one of those cherries from the shine I bought from a friend’s daddy who lived in a shed, undisclosed up in the foothills, the witchcraft came bubbling up and waited there in the sauce-burned roof of my mouth. Your son left to feed a friend’s cat, gone for only minutes, and it was just me and you and Ned and the dogs all huddled up on the couch and then I popped the second cherry on top of that prosecco I’d had with pie and like everyone who makes Christmas, I was worn out and sad about losing time, being the only one who knew the future. I cried, so hard and sloppy I couldn’t hardly breathe no more and yeah my accent is real and it sure as shit gets worse when alcohol-steeped and y’all were trying to get me to eat something, the Chex Mix at least, hon, but I pushed your reaching hands out of my way and stood, jar still in hand, my bah humbug Oscar the Grouch sweater making me sweat something awful because synthetic fabric and eczema tells its own story and I’m still choked for air but still talking about how y’all were all gonna die long before you got old, how there’d be nothing left, no reason to do this manufactured merry but I was wrong—I still make the pies and put up the tree only now I carry shells in my pockets and call them signs.

Beth Gilstrap is the author of Deadheading & Other Stories (2021), Winner of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize and short-listed for the Stanford Libraries William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She is also the author of I Am Barbarella: Stories (2015) from Twelve Winters Press and No Man’s Wild Laura (2016) from Hyacinth Girl Press. She and her house full of critters currently call the Charleston-metro area home. As a neurodivergent human who lives with c-PTSD, she is quite vocal about ending the stigma surrounding mental illness.