Sweet Rot
LAUREN BROWN
It was June, and we were dying. On the porch and the rocking chairs that creaked with the wind passing through each slot of wood. The chairs were once white, and we were once young enough to walk through the creek without boots on, and you never spoke of leaving. It was the summer Grandma stopped sleeping in her room and blamed it on the smell, but we never noticed, and we never asked. I remember the trees that howled and curled over the old yellow house, dropping strands of moss like old ghosts on the roof. The house would sway with each storm as we watched from the rocking chairs, and I remember you looked at me like something awful was going to happen, and you said, “This is going to be the summer that strips us clean like the pigs hanging from Mr. Nelson’s shed. By December, you’ll be a stranger to me.” But I didn’t ask what you meant, and you looked away into the storm that tore the moss from the trees, and I remember thinking your hair looked longer than before.
Grandma had us sleep on the porch with her because whatever was in her room was creeping through the house. The nights were warm, and moisture slid across our skin like the worms coming up to feel the rain. And Grandma snored in her rocking chair, and we snuck away to find frogs in the creek, and they screamed louder than I ever could. You told me there would be a time when we’d forget the sound of the frogs and how we look now, and one day there would be a person who would devour us whole, and we would let them. I remember thinking something was different in your voice. It seemed deeper, and I had that feeling you get sometimes when you’re watching TV or reading, and suddenly you feel the overwhelming urge to run home but’re already there and you know everyone left years before, but you still hope they’re in the kitchen or the office or even on that old porch where you last saw them. But it leaves as quickly as it comes, and that only makes it worse.
Your steps were heavier on the way back and I felt it again—that gut-wrenching yearning that turned to disgust as I thought of myself and my ever-changing body. I wrapped my arms around my stomach and listened to your steps as they grew softer and more distant. Grandma was awake when we got back, and when I turned around to find you, you were gone. Disappeared into the old trees and trailing moss, and I tried to look in the creek, but suddenly it wasn’t June and it was cold and the creek was dry as the skin on my hands and Grandma told me we were moving away and she said, on the old porch with the wind weaving around her, “You know my father always told me I had a nose like a hound. I could smell it long ago. In my bedroom, then the house, and now here, on you. I can smell the rot in you and it ain’t pretty.”
LAUREN BROWN (she/her) is a Florida based artist and poet. In her free time, Lauren can be found birding, painting American Traditional style signs, or plotting her escape from the Sunshine State. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in The Mangrove Review and Eunoia Review.
