SmokeLong Quarterly

1. When your mother turns into a tree, no one tells you how many times you’ll need to fill the watering can. An arborist comes once a week to check her new growth, to push back the dirt and examine her roots. “Looks good,” he says, as her shoulders calcify to bark. At night, you hear her limbs groan through the window of your childhood bedroom, a place you thought you’d never sleep in again. The posters curl off the walls and the old stuffed sheep is still squished in the corner, and your mother’s branches creak in the moonlight. (When you close your eyes, it reminds you of the sounds she would make when she uncurled from the couch after watching her British detective shows. “Oooooookay,” she would say. “Up we go.”) You hug the sheep in bed once more as you hear the back door open and close, as you hear your father tiptoe across the lawn, and you lift the blinds and watch him thumb a leaf, hold a branch, loop his arm around the trunk that was her body, and whisper “It’s ok, honey. It’s all going to be ok.”
2. No one told you how many times you’d set the table for three. How you’d line up three glasses, cook stews for three so that the leftovers languish in the refrigerator, grow furred with mold. How you’d hide the evidence before your father came in from the backyard because you couldn’t stand the way his face crumpled the first time it happened. That even while you watch your mother through the back door, her slowing blink, her stretching branches, you still forget that she’ll never eat real food again. (Something she used to do with so much gusto, such relish that you almost found it embarrassing. A napkin tucked into her shirt, soup slurped from the spoon, fallen crumbs around the legs of her chair.) Some days you convince yourself that the bark has receded, that her lip twitched in a way that was impossible yesterday, and you think, Maybe there’s still a chance. After dinner, you sit down in the dirt and rest your hand on the flared base of the trunk, the bark rough under your palm. You can hear your mother’s rattling breath as she sleeps the deep sleep of the almost-gone, but no matter how much you tell yourself something alive is there, she just feels wooden.
3. When the wood creeps over the skin of her neck, you cross the lawn to sit beside her as the pink sky melts over her crown. The stupid question slips from your mouth: “How was your day?” No one told you that a look of loathing would cross her face. It’s an expression that lasts for a fraction of a moment, but it’s that terrible look that you never forget. Not the grimaces of pain, or the tender way she told you when the first root grew from the bottom of her foot. It’s that expression that you’ll carry with you. (At night you worry that look will cover everything else that your mother was: the astonishing loudness of her sneezes, the apologetic gossip after a dinner party, her soft gentle humming as she scrubbed the dishes in the kitchen sink.)
4. If no one told you, then how could you have known that your father would throw open your door in the middle of the night and cry “It’s the end!”; that you’d stand outside in the moonlight as her final flush turned to papery bark; how you’d be afraid to stay near her trunk; afraid to leave her alone; how you’d collect the leaves that fell that first autumn and press them between the pages of your childhood books. Six months later, you donate those books when your father moves out of the house, and when you remember the leaves you left in those pages, you call the seller. “We’ve already sold them,” she says over the phone. “They’re already gone.”
5. No one tells you any of these things. Instead, they say, “I’m so sorry,” or “How is she?” or, even worse, “How are you?” So when it’s all over, and you call your father every day to make sure he hears someone’s voice, you tear a scrap of paper and write down “This paper was once a tree” and tape it to the bathroom mirror in your dingy apartment in the city you thought you should live in. You wonder how you’re supposed to just go back to work on Monday. Even now, you think, she is feeding on sunlight, her body phosphorescing, taking in the warmth and the carbon dioxide and converting it into oxygen which only you can breathe. Each morning, you stare at the scrap of paper on your bathroom mirror. You had in mind that this would be a way of answering their questions, of saying that all things end, but when you wash your face and reread the words, you’re not sure you’ve quite hit the mark. The metaphor seems too simple, too easy, too restrained to quite measure up to the things you now know.

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“The Things No One Tells You When Your Mother Turns Into a Tree” is a finalist in The SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction 2026.