after Paul Klee’s “Hesitation”

 

Even when I was still slung on my mother’s back, I knew how it would be. But she would say the blueberries are sweeter on someone else’s vine, which meant that they are not. A snake still slid out from under and bit her as she picked. And when fruit spilled from her bucket some poor fool who thought our vines a forest was crushed.

Not that those tiny ones could do anything about it. We are all large: mother, father, my brother, and of course, me. We can outrun them by wiggling a toe. They don’t know we’re here, though, because they can’t really see anything big—we are a blur to them, a stramineous expanse they call the fuliginous sky. So sometimes accidents happen. The blueberries are a case in point. No matter. I do wish I could be them and experience the minutiae of their world.

You might wonder what happened to Mother from the snake bite. The bruise lasted a week, but kingsnakes are not poisonous. Sometimes I lie on my back in the olive meadow and wonder what that snake would look like to them? Nightfall, perhaps? I pluck a sunflower and let it linger near my nostril to breathe in its hay-like scent. Then I question how the flower feels about being used this way and worry that I am too careless. I feel my eyebrows syncing together, furrowing my brow. Mother says my face will stay this way if I keep thinking. What she really means is if I keep feeling.

 

Luanne Castle’s stories have appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Gooseberry Pie, Bending Genres, Bull, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cleaver, Disappointed Housewife, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, and many other journals and anthologies. She has published four award-winning poetry collections. Her hybrid memoir-in-flash will be published by ELJ Editions in December 2026.