Editor’s note: This story reads more like a folk tale than creative nonfiction, even with the beginning sentence stating that it’s a true story. However, one section of Amanda’s cover letter brought everything together in a way that we felt was important. We also didn’t want to interrupt the flow of Amanda’s writing and ask her to fit it into the actual story. Therefore, we are including that part of the cover letter at the end as an afterward.
This is a true story. The body knows things the mind doesn’t, because the body holds a secret contract with the unconscious. Our bodies stitch trauma to the bone like an heirloom sin. There is a type of sorrow so wicked, so consuming, that even the body buckles beneath its weight. My grandmother calls those who carry it “marked.” This kind of trauma transcends the self. It crosses the womb.
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The girl’s father plowed, the smell of southern soil festooning the air. The corn had just been cut, the stalks left to rattle. He was turning the fields before winter, dust rising in the fall air. The earth rippled, dark soil folding over itself in soft ribbons. The girl wore a blue dress, a patch of sky drifting over a sea of soil. Only a few years old, the girl lingered near the tractor, too close for him to see. The mammoth tire consumed her, pulling her down, pressing her skull into the earth like a tender bulb.
From the porch, the girl’s mother watched tragedy. She saw the flash of blue snuff out in the soil. The sight of her daughter’s head being mashed into the ground poured through her—over her, into her, all the way down. It grazed the tethered soul she carried inside her womb. Inside her deeply disturbed body.
But the dirt had just been turned, fluffy and forgiving. The soft soil cradled rather than crushed. The little girl stood, whole, and the mother’s knees gave way—not in relief, but something much older. She saw death before the miracle was realized; her eyes saw, and her soul turned. There in the mother’s marrow, was the undoing of a scream that had already started tunneling through her.
Some months passed, and the little girl became a big sister when her mother gave birth in January. A girl named Wanda.
Wanda’s life was fleeting. Less than a day.
She was born with only half a head.
Afterward: This piece is based on a true story passed down orally by my grandmother—part of the quiet archive of my family’s Southern memory. After hearing this story told verbally my whole life, I recently found the death certificate, confirming Wanda’s manner of birth/death.
Amanda Ashworth is an English teacher and writer raised in rural Tennessee. She keeps one foot in the classroom and the other in the creek. Rooted in Appalachian tradition and storytelling, her work explores memory, lineage, and Southern womanhood.