Strawberry Season by Taylor Hopkins

It was strawberry season and she wanted to be picked too, leaning against the wall in her shortcake dress, hiding her adventurous fingers behind her back. They were lined up on the vine, so many small sparkling girls. Sweet girls. Good for the tasting.

The boys moved in packs, their shadows conspiring at their feet. She strained to hear their whispers over the oompah horns of the band. They stared like their eyes could eat. But when they laughed, it rang out like church bells. Theirs was the kind of laughter a town organized its life around. They clustered over the glistening punch bowl where berries bobbed. Her mind swam with stems that had lost their heads.

One by one, the boys began to pluck their fancy. It would be nice to be a picker, she thought. The whole world elongating in the direction of your want. Meanwhile, all the savoring she did was in secret. Placing a berry ruby ripe on her tongue was as close to heaven as she’d ever get.

But their time was short, and before long their beauty lay bleeding under stomping feet. That’s the thing about creepers. They have nothing to hold on to. The climbing plants, they’ve got their trees, their shrubs — even a telephone pole will do. Tendrils grasping, always seeking, always finding. Probably she could sort the whole room this way, creepers and climbers.

She dragged a jeweled foot against the linoleum. She was surefooted, that you learn in the fields. How to feed and flutter and dodge like the insects. How to stay alive.

The round-shouldered boy was trying to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t let him. You don’t buy shoes like hers for a boy like that. She wanted one with milky hands, the kind used to play piano. She desired a boy without a season. One that just grew up and up and up towards the sun.

She felt her spine curling like her hair and forced her shoulders back, chest pointing headlight proud, just like momma taught her. She angled their beams to strike the boys’ faces. They didn’t seem to notice. She was sixteen, still in season, but already it was like she had lost something. She sniffed under her arms, wondering if she could have gone bad without knowing.

She licked her lips, dry and cracked as the wall behind her. She was one of the last ones left. She shifted, longing to distance herself from the others, afraid their damage might spread like a fungus.

When the music turned syrupy slow, the raven-haired boy realized with a jolt that he’d never picked. He approached, stretching his soft fingers in her direction. It was enough to make her forget herself. She placed a hand in his and watched him swallow back revulsion at the sight of her fingernails. She let it pass. She wanted to dance.

“You’re sweet.” He spoke it like an apology. He twirled her around and right on beat, bone crunched under heel, the sweet red of him staining the dance floor.

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TAYLOR HOPKINS — Taylor likes to construct weird and wondrous worlds of words. She lives primarily in her head, as well as the Toronto, Canada area, where she earned an MFA in Scriptwriting and Story Design at Toronto Metropolitan University. She is interested in bodies and the disembodied, presence and absence, and the feelings and fears that nestle in shadowy places.

Art by LISA PIAZZA — Lisa is a writer, educator, artist and mother from Oakland, Ca. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. She is an Assistant Editor for Porcupine Literary and a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review.