The Bluestone Review 2025

Prose

begged him to stay out of that tree, but he didn’t listen. It’s funny, I don’t think of him as a grandfather, but only her husband. Legend says she was never the same. She was known as Maw White, who could cure the sick and broken. She never spoke again, and folks, though wary of her ways, trusted her healing talent. They called her witch. If I look back far enough, I romanticize answers to complicated questions that may or may not have anything to do with reality and embarrass the living and the dead. I tell the story of wildcats fighting on Maw White’s porch as it was told to me, as gospel. If I look back far enough, the road down Buzzard Spit holler still curves around Maw White’s chimney. It’s covered in ivy and moss. Some say at night, embers glow and smoke rises from what’s left of her home. The tree her husband fell from grows proud beside it. She waits for him to come home.

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