Seeing Red

Seeing Red

Georgia sneaks her brother’s tin box of farm toys out of the closet, arranges wooly sheep, black and white cows, bearded goats, green tillers, and squat hay balers. She lets them putt-putter on the patchwork quilt, supplying moos, baas, clanks and vrooms, snorting when she plunges the curly-tailed pig snout-down into the toy box-now-hog trough. Her hand grazes something at the bottom, something she’s overlooked, but recognizes now. She drops the piglet, falls silent, her nine-year-old heart galloping a fury. It’s the red farmer atop a red tractor with a sneery smirk and a piece of hay stuck between his teeth, like her older, apple-cheeked cousin, Hunter, had when he took her into the field to see the corn last summer, as if she hadn’t seen it before and needed him to show her how to pick and shuck it just right. Georgia turns the toy this way and that, sniffs its oily rubber odor, examines each scarlet detail under the glare of the bedside lamp before twisting off the head and burying the evidence deep under her mattress.

 

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About the Author

Kathryn Silver-Hajo’s work was selected for the 2023 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and Best American Food Writing. Kathryn’s work appears in Atticus Review, CRAFT, Emerge Literary, Ghost Parachute, New Flash Fiction Review, Pithead Chapel, Ruby Literary, The Phare, and other lovely journals. Her flash collection Wolfsong and novel Roots of The Banyan Tree were both published in 2023. More at: kathrynsilverhajo.com; facebook.com/kathryn.silverhajo; twitter.com/KSilverHajo; instagram.com/kathrynsilverhajo.

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Photo by Jessica Lewis ? thepaintedsquare: https://www.pexels.com/photo/girl-sitting-on-brown-sand-while-playing-tractor-toy-189860/

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