BY Samantha Moe
You always turn me into canary melons when you’re mad, says her friend. Sabine doesn’t know
how to respond. She has been turning her friend into canaries when she needs to speak with her.
Sometimes she is a fleet of parakeets, a bundle of angry river herons, but never a canary melon.
Would you like to be a clementine? Sabine asks. Her friend waves her arm in the air. You’re not
listening, she says. Before she can walk out the swinging kitchen door, she turns into a bundle of
gooseberries and falls onto the newly mopped floor. Sabine gathers the gooseberries in her hands.
It is easier to speak this way. She tells the gooseberries she is tired of having nightmares about
violence, she is tired of being a survivor. She doesn’t want to learn any more information about
revictimization. No one believes her stories, so what does it matter. The gooseberries don’t
respond. Sabine thinks about the times her speech was stolen. She never knew how to write about
what was taken from her, so she turned all the men into lobster tanks and fisherman’s traps. Some
of her exes are the ocean. Someone she is in love with is a breeze. Everything is so real, and it
hurts so much. There is too much flesh, she thinks to herself. At night, she dreams about scars. Her
blood turns to lychees and loganberries. The hospital trips are plums and prickly pears. No one
will believe me, she thinks to herself, scooping out bits of her trauma and replacing them with
pomegranate seeds. But do they need to? It is unclear whether Sabine believes herself. The
gooseberries in the bowl have condensation, making them look like they are crying. It is early
morning and grey sunlight hits the table through slats in the curtains. Sabine tries to turn herself
into a pink parakeet, but it is difficult now all her organs have been replaced with seeds. She is
tired of being strong. This is a familiar conversation. Though some will argue, she knows there is
no difference between what was stolen from her and the way all cherry patches look like blood.
Sam Moe is the author of Cicatrizing the Daughters (FlowerSong Press, Winter 2024), Grief Birds (BS Lit, 2023), Heart Weeds (Alien Buddha Press 2022), and the chapbook Animal Heart (Harvard Square Press 2024). Her short story collection, I Might Trust You is forthcoming from Experiments in Fiction (Winter 2024). She has been accepted to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference (2024) and received fellowships from the Longleaf Writer’s Conference, the Key West Literary Seminar, and Château d’Orquevaux.