This story is by Jon-Michael Plennert and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
You’re unsure how you got here, walking on the dirt path between the elms and rosebushes with the gray windbreaker, jeans, and boots, getting pelted with raindrops from every direction. Impenetrable gray clouds keep the sun at bay and soft kisses of wind only moments ago have suddenly morphed into harsh gusts, threatening your stability. You can’t simply stand here in this mess sinking into the mud with brown leaves circling and newly barren tree branches reaching out, digging their claws into your clothes, and scratching with their dirty sap covered twig-fingers. It’s time to put your head down, plod steadily forward, but thoughts are getting blown back and forth, the upcoming decision imminent. It’s not going to be easy, deciding on only one of them. You love them both.
On the one hand, there is Lily, your relationship with her only four months young. Every time you woke up next to her you could feel that fluttering in your stomach, working its tingle outward to the extremities, making you feel radiant. Glowing with energy and yet worried about losing that light, like it was a firefly dancing in the dusk. The aspiration, while impossible, was to live for eternity in the bed next to her.
Upon each waking moment, her legs still entwined with yours, your mind would race toward the imaginary future: celebrating nuptials, mortgaging a home, raising children. The memories and laughs and adventures all flashing and ringing inside your synapses as part of an idealistic paradise.
Considering Lily, you are getting hit a little faster now with those rain pellets and you’re thinking about where you can seek refuge. Tearing yourself away from a myopic focus on the dirt path, you steal a glance upward in front of you and make out a single-story log cabin planted in the middle of the path.
You thought maybe you could achieve solace from the wind and rain inside this dwelling, but looking harder at the details of the cabin, you sense a certain strangeness emanating from it. The roof has a gaping hole in it the size of a Volkswagen Bug. The two windows flanking the maroon door have both been busted out, each of them with jagged pieces of glass forming a rough circle, looking like the mouth of a great-white. There are even stains of powder blue graffiti marking the wood adjacent the right window and you can make out three letters of what appears to be the start of a word: C – H – O. The rest seems to wrap around the side of the structure, but you’re not brave enough to go up there and read it. Time to turn around.
The wind and rain retreat for a moment while you walk back the way you came. Your mind begins to drift again, floats back to the dilemma. Your other love comes into focus.
She’s the one you know best, the one you’ve known longest, and the one you might love more, but in a different way because she is your mother.
She’s been everything you have ever needed in a mother your whole life: teacher, nurse, dispenser of discipline. She’s given you the ultimate gift of life of course, but what she’s also given you is her time and love and attention. What she’s done, what any reasonable mother does for her own child, is capitulate. And how can you ever thank her for that surrender? Quite simply, there can be no fitting measure of gratitude.
As you think about your mother’s importance, you stop and stare, thinking about whether your sanity is intact, because that log cabin is back. You are certain you turned around, and yet here it is again in your path. Is it a little bigger now since that stolen first glance? It is, isn’t it? A little bit wider even as well, presence looming. There are people inside the cabin too. They’re just standing there. Watching you.
Enough with this. Time to turn around once more. You walk, and after fifteen seconds you see it again in your path. Wider than before and larger. There’s a second story now, but that massive hole in the roof is still present.
You’re getting nervous, so you do something you wouldn’t normally do and abandon the marked path into the foliage. The barbs from the rose bushes take fibers out of the wind breaker as you try to fight through them. You get twisted around in the denseness of the wilderness and those twig-fingers are grasping and clawing now, trying to wrap you up. Tripping over a fallen elm trunk, you stumble and fall. A bed of leaves and sticks meet lips, nose, and forehead, and suddenly you’re tasting the bitterness of autumn.
Is this what a concussion feels like?
There’s a dizziness that starts to envelop the surroundings and it’s hard to tell, but it seems like that stupid log cabin has returned and it’s all around you.
No, it is in fact all around you, or the exterior is anyway. Transformed and seemingly alive, the whole cabin, mere yards away now, has somehow encircled you, wrapped around you like a constrictor coiling around it’s dinner. Nowhere left to go. The maroon door is only a few paces away and there’s no outrunning this thing anymore and the only way forward is through the cabin.
You reach for the weathered knob, hands shaking, breath starting to pick up, and throw it open, half expecting those people to jump out from their hiding places inside to provide the scare of a lifetime, but something else happens instead.
Entering the cabin, you are blasted with the scent of pine. The smell fills up your nostrils, mixing with a layer of dust, placing you on the cusp of a sneeze. Rain is waterfalling in through the hole in the roof and while the interior has provided comfort from the wind and rain, you exhale and see contrails of breath swirling in front of you, disappearing into the mystery of this place. The people you saw from the outside are in fact here, but they’re not jumping out at you trying to drum up scares. They are instead seated at opposite ends of a long table in the dining area straight ahead, gazes fixed on you.
There’s Lily, seated at your left in a cherry oak dining chair, draped in floral whites, her ink black hair up in a bun, aqua eyes gleaming while she fireworks that warm smile. And on the right, there’s your mother across from her at the other end in an identical chair, wearing her dependable emerald cocktail dress with the pearl necklace passed down from your grandmother.
They don’t need to speak for you to understand it’s time to decide between the two of them, and this is the crux of the matter. Your mother thinks Lily overbearing, a puppet master commandeering your individuality. Lily feels ostracized for who she is: headstrong and independent, defiant even. But Lily’s best qualities had flown too close to stubborn, uncompromising, and rude. Misunderstanding had led to anger, obscenities and objects had been tossed, and by then you knew the gap between them was more of a canyon. Now, staying here with your mother means losing your soulmate and forgoing what might be your only chance to be your best possible self. Time to choose…
C-H-O-O-S-E. The graffiti.
You understand now, fate was always going to bring you here.
And yet you stall. One final rethink. Consider the older version of yourself with your hair white and thin, bones brittle and skin wrinkled. Picture Lily there with you. The woman who encouraged you into your manager’s office to ask for that promotion you were awarded because she knew you were worth it. The woman who pushed you to the top of that mountain you’d never thought you could summit. You can stretch to the stars with her at your side.
And your dear mother loves you so much, but is blinded by her jealousy and feels understandably replaced. Tossed aside like a child’s toy into a cardboard box destined to collect dust. You’ve told her how she’s irreplaceable and will never lose you, but now that all this is happening, you’re being forced into a decision that you’d never thought you’d have to make.
Lily or your mother.
The time is up.
You’ve made the choice.
Taking her hand, you walk out the maroon door, palming away the tear about to slide down your cheek, thinking about the person you’ve lost, and yet also filled with hope.
Outside the cabin, the rain has turned to a light mist, but you feel good about it, for a tied knot is always harder to unravel when wet.
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