Thorns by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

“Knock, knock?”  A woman’s voice from the hallway accompanies soft rapping on my door. It’s Susan and her five-year old, Jill, who fell while picking wild blackberries last week. Thorns tore up the girl’s palms. They come every morning so I can examine her hands.

They were part of the early influx, women and children emerging from the forest. People said it was safer here, away from the cities. Less shelling. But being far away means you eventually run out of things, like gasoline and medicine. We had stockpiles, of course. Now, we’re rationing what’s left until we can get a helicopter drop. Only no one seems to know when that will happen.

Susan is anxious, Jill wouldn’t walk today. “How’s that boo-boo of yours?” I position my wheelie-stool in front of the girl and swallow my despair over dull eyes and flushed cheeks. I can smell the infection, like overripe plums left to rot beneath a tree. Jill’s fingers are swollen like sausages and the wounds on each palm are black and bubbly, like the dangling berries that started all of this. Jill cries and squirms in her mother’s lap when I clean her wounds. Susan is usually a real Mary Poppins but today she can’t seem to summon the energy. She kisses and shushes the girl, tries to hold her still. 

“I want to go home, I want to see Daddy,” Jill sobs over and over. I apply a thick layer of Polysporin, fuck the rations. From a drawer, I pull out pink bandages that I made from a t-shirt I found while sifting through our outpost’s precious recycling piles. 

“Jill,” I say, “Look what I have for you.” But she keeps her eyes tightly closed against me. 

When they leave, I step outside to catch my breath. Jill is clinging to Susan like a baby possum. I’ve never asked Susan where they sleep but I assume the Visitor Center in one of those stuffy rooms, crammed full of cots and laundry and donated toys and disorienting photographs of smiling families on vacation. I wonder if the other moms whisper about Jill, if they scoot their piled-up belongings further and further away from Susan’s, put more space between their cots and hers? I wonder what Susan will do when the inevitable happens?

Will that little mound of dirt tie her to this place or will she disappear back into the forest?

Artist’s Statement

Mother-daughter relationships haunt me and this piece is a perfect example. My original intention for this story, which started in a SmokeLong Quarterly workshop, was to try something new, something vaguely speculative. I had post-apocalyptic images in my head and a puzzler sentence to work off of: We dab it with a paper towel and worry about germs. But, as usual, my writing found its way back to this binary. My heartbreak over Ukraine definitely shaped the piece, too.

Dawn Tasaka Steffler is a fiction writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a 2023 recipient of the SmokeLong Quarterly Fellowship for Emerging Writers. Her work appears or is forthcoming in SoFloPoJo, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, and others. She is working on a first novel. Find her on Twitter @DawnSteffler