by Lindsey Miller

There wasn’t a funeral after Mrs. A—-‘s son died, nor a cremation, and no one spoke up about it either, at least not to question her. Small towns, but people could find their own business to mind. Good fences made good neighbors. No one saw her for six months. Then one way or another, come spring she was sighted planting tulip bulbs. The flowers came up wet red and streaked with white, like meat marbled with fat. You never saw tulips colored particularly like that.

Mrs. O—-‘s dog got into the bed one day, dug up the remainder of the bulb and root ball, and brought the mess home. Wagging his tail he spit the muck into her annoyed hands, and her fingers found something small and hard in the morass: a tooth. Finger bones, for other bulbs; all the teeth, the long toe bones.

No one had anything to say to that, either.

Lindsey Miller graduated in 2012 from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a degree in Foreign Languages with a Spanish concentration and an art minor.  Currently, she lives in Incheon, South Korea, teaching in an English Immersion school. Her work has previously been published in Cicada Magazine. In her spare time, besides writing, Lindsey enjoys printmaking, reading, and running.