Petals of the Dogwood

Jill imagines the dogwood’s branches bursting with pink-shot eyes, creamy blossoms watching her, seeking her attention. Hungering for her gaze. Silly, maybe, but she avoids the tree, refuses to look at it. She hides inside as the tree’s boughs scratch at her window, lash her roof in the disjointed rhythm of a spring storm.
When the blooms fade, eyelids closing for the final time, she goes to the tree, inspects its flowerless limbs. Grinds its fallen dead-petal eyes into the grass with her toe. She flushes warm with the power of it, that blink of dominance over nature and her own fear—even though she knows she’s being foolish. It’s just a tree.
She turns her focus to the storm damage. Torn shingles and clogged gutters await. She climbs her ladder, hammers nails, rips pale tendrils from the rain spouts. Ignores the cloying scent, the honeyed prickle of gooseflesh. Convinces herself it’s only a breeze rustling the leaves—not branchlets quivering bare and sightless in their want, riffling closer, aching to taste the sweet cream of her eyes.

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Myna Chang’s work has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W.W. Norton), Best Small Fictions, and CRAFT, among others. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Writings Award in Flash Fiction, and she hosts the Electric Sheep speculative fiction reading series. Her chapbook, The Potential of Radio and Rain, will be published by CutBank Books in 2023. Read more at MynaChang.com or @MynaChang.