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bowl bit into my hip. I’d filled the bowl well above the lip with the orange, plush fruit all precariously balanced on top of one another.

I chose the ripest apricots. The perfectly sun-softened ones whose flesh gave way beneath my fingertips.

This was the only tree left alive on my family’s property. It grew out from beneath the abandoned truck bed camper. The wood floor had broken through. The windows busted out. We butchered sheep under the apricot tree, so the soil was rich with iron. It’s where the stray cats birthed their kittens. They sensed the earth’s fertility here.

So, the earth was also rich with placenta, blood, and water.

Which could be the reason why this apricot tree lived. I looked up at its branches snarled like an elderly woman’s arthritic fingers.

The apricots hung heavy. Some were still green, too bitter to be harvested. I looked past the trailer to see the other trees my father had planted. Three cottonwoods. They’d all died. The goats had leapt over the panels we’d set up and eaten the weak saplings.

I headed back to the trailer. I set down the aluminum bowl. It was still early. My ride for school hadn’t arrived yet. I had time to slip into basketball shorts. I walked past my mother’s room. She wasn’t there. Her pilling floral comforter spread across her bed untouched from the night before. She worked late most nights, but I assumed she was snagging some new guy who stopped in at Sonic. She did that a lot. The worst part was when she’d bring them home. I’d see them stumble shit-faced and fumbling into her bedroom. At night I could hear them making drunken love. She’d always cry afterwards, a high-pitched whine, the sound the wind makes when rushing in through a cracked window. I was convinced it was the windows. I went to Ace Hardware and caulked her windows closed. The following night, the whining still rang through the house.

My mother always chose jailbirds. She’d try really hard to keep them, but they never stayed. I think it’s because that kind of devotion warranted love, but drunks only loved themselves. They were like river rocks—brown, round, and constantly slipping out from beneath her fingertips. My phone buzzed from my pocket.

New Message from My Homie JT: I’m outside.

Out in the dirt driveway, JT sat inside his white 1997 Chevy Camaro. That wind-scratched car was his whole world, even though FICTION | 9