TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Ben Sloan

had assembled before he died.

Her feet, stationary, weighed to the stone bedding of the bridge. She asked herself why she knew that this tip of layered wooden shingles was Onkel Georg’s home—her mother’s home. She inhaled: that sour, beguiling scent of forest. The city smelled different. Vienna smelled like grey and black, cement and plexiglas, Ubahn and traffic. She inhaled again. She thought about the past: Dad I’m a dog, I can smell allll the trees! Her father used to drive her from Klagenfurt where they lived to his parent’s house on the outskirts of Graz, and while he drove, she would stick her head out the window and sniff the forest air. Sometimes her dad drove so fast that all the trees became a blur of brown and green. Sometimes when he drove really really fast, the trees even kak- ood and howled like animals. But no matter how much the car cranked and rattled, gripping the empty forest highway as her father accelerated them towards Graz, she could still catch the different tree smells. I can smell all the species! I know all the trees. Her bible, the revered Guidebook to Austria’s Forests , sat on her lap, in which the Latin names of each tree was listed, along with their origins, history, and anatomical features. The Book as she called it, went everywhere with her. But, like any true expert, she only kept it around in the rare case that she forgot the Latin name of a tree, or for some reason fell short of reciting how tall a tree could grow, or in the case of a family dinner, where some showmanship was called for, she forgot exactly how tall the tenoldest trees inAustria 198