Where the Wild Russets Fall (Completed)

There are two kinds of silence in the Mackey house: the kind that came after the machines were switched off, and the kind left behind when the furniture was carried down the stairs. Moving day has arrived in the orchard hills of Blackwood Valley. Twelve-year-old Ethan Mackey has one hour left before the tailgates slam shut on the U-Haul and the keys are handed over to strangers. His mother, Clara, has been gone four months, but the backyard still smells of her—of vinegar rinses, damp wool, and the bruised, copper-skinned fruit of the century-old Roxbury Russet tree she claimed as her parlor. Hidden in the split-fork of the Russet's lowest limb is a battered, green-cloth fairy tale book Ethan hasn't opened since Clara’s hands grew too cold to turn the pages. As the engine of his father's truck idles in the gravel drive, Ethan climbs into the boughs for one final reading of The Weaver of Winter-Glass—and confronts the terrifying, beautiful truth of what must be abandoned, and what refuses to die. A standalone, deeply emotional literary one-shot exploring grief, childhood, the stories we use to shelter ourselves from the cold, and the roots that hold us when everything else is torn away.