soul river, bone dry by Maxwell Harris | Winner 2025 Rural Teen Writing Contest

it isn’t supposed to be so hot this far into september,

but still i stand outside the neighborhood grocery, my hands too

full of swollen paper bags to wipe at the oil-sweat-dirt compound

smeared across my forehead. instead my glands soak through my

soles and into the asphalt underfoot, and i return a part of me to the

ground i sprang from.

before it was cracked, alcohol-stained sidewalk, verdancy

wouldn’t be a phenomenon, and i wouldn’t be a tired, wolf-haired,

koi-bruised teenager getting weighed down

by the price of milk by the gallon. my family has to feed somehow.

before this soil was paved over, i could’ve sunk my hands into it,

let the teeming life run between my fingers. my own kind of

forager.

but once i blink, i’m back to a small town of sirens and senseless

wanderers, and the sun beats down through a broken atmosphere.

i hurry home.

my father spills across the couch like oozing sap as i recall a scene

from a walk around town. i’ve tracked in dirt from my soles, but i

hold his attention in the palms of my outstretched hands so he

doesn’t notice. dad calls me a storyteller.

there was roadkill pushed so far from the asphalt that it bled past

the sidewalk. was it even roadkill? it was a rabbit, with it’s head

clean off, legs outstretched as if even in death, even senseless, it

could bound deep into the wilds.

rabbits like that don’t get a burial. i turn to the dog, shaking off any

trace of outside before he lies like my father. his muzzle looks like

he stuck it into snow.

i wonder, in between describing the innards that draped the grass

around the rabbit, if the dog would get a burial. if i would muddy

my knees, scrape at fertile soil for a hole big enough for him, if i’d

even get far enough away that his loss didn’t cross my mind as i

would walk past it. i decide he’ll just have to live forever.

lightning struck the tree taller than any other in the forest. mom

says standing out attracts unwanted attention like flies attracted to

a rabbit carcass. the tree splits clean in half and it’s no longer the

tallest. two years pass until i’m walking by the tree’s skeleton

again, and new life has climbed out of the soil and covered any

trace of disaster. i wonder if i’ll be forgotten as quickly. or, maybe

it’s a burial, and it’s honoring the tree to bloom atop it. in that case,

i hope that when i die, flowers grow inside of me too.

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