TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Ben Sloan

different trees… And yet, as she ridiculed herself, now a woman— twenty years old, a real fucking woman!—she asked herself if her interest in trees and the forestwasmere coincidence, or, if the fact hermother had named her Birke , and that hermother supposedly loved trees, and that her mother had killed herself in this river, surrounded by Birke trees—the river, whose gait she could hear from the bridge she now stood on—had some deeper meaning ; and if there was some deeper meaning to her relationship with trees, maybe it had something to do with the fact that she knew this tip of layered wooden shingles was the very home that her mother had grown up in. Or, hermotherkilledherself in this riverbecause itwas thenearest river, and her mother named her Birke because it’s a pretty name, and Birke happened to, like many other children, merely come up with some special significance for her name because that’s what kids do: they think they are special and that they have super powers and that their name means something. But in reality, we don’t mean anything and we are going to die meaning nothing, whether our names are Birke or Anna. She checked her cell phone: 23% , 15:20. She looked up: four hills to overcome, then she would make it to the base of the valley. It will be dark soon, she thought. Gotta keep moving. • Her uncle, the historian, had mentioned the cabin. Through conversations with people that he had met, in the sort of way that people ask where you come from, and you, clearly not interested, 200