“Maybe we should go check on Mom,” Marie said, snipping a cluster of grapes from the vine. The scissors were too big for her skinny fingers and kept slipping. Marie knew their mother was close to madness since their sister Helen had died a few months earlier. Up and down the rows, neighbors and relatives were talking and laughing; some were singing in Italian. The main house was quiet, except for the occasional bang of a screen door or shout from an aunt to her child or husband.

“I want to stay here,” Jeanne said, smiling. The girls’ small hands parted the grapes, snipped, dropped bunches into the bushel basket between their feet. Philip, their brother, and the boy cousins were working the next row over, reaching and cutting more quickly because they were boys and faster, and once in a while, tossing their pocketknives in the dirt to chase each other down the rows. The men, mostly uncles, carried the baskets to the house and lined them up along the pit where the older girls, teenagers, crushed the fruit with bare feet. Marie and Jeanne’s mother, Antonette, crossed the porch and shaded her eyes, a hazy figure in the mid-afternoon heat, and yelled something to Louie, their father. Antonette disappeared inside and reappeared carrying a pitcher and a towel. Her dress clung limp against her body, the towel over one shoulder like a white banner. The Roseto ladies always cooked a big dinner and made lemonade on harvest day. At sundown, everyone would sit in the yard at long tables with trays of manicotti, ziti, and ravioli. Antonette had brought potatoes to make her famous gnocchi. There was room for only a few vines in the Sabatine’s backyard, and this was the case for most of their neighbors. But Antonette’s father, Michele Capone, owned a field next to his old homestead on the outskirts of town—the largest vineyard in Roseto. At summer’s end, he invited all the families to help harvest and bring grapes from their backyard vines. All the fruit got mashed together in the pit and dumped in his enormous basement vat, where the burgundy mixture fermented during the long winter, thickened and grew strong-smelling.

“She’s putting on her nice face,” Marie said. Antonette joined the aunts—Josephine, Rosie and Lucy—hands on their waists, talking. Behind the curtains women moved in and out of the dim light.

“That’s because she’s outside,” Jeanne said, her five-year-old voice a whimsical, matter-of-fact upswing. “With her sisters.”

A baby wailed and the women filed in, Antonette last, squinting at the field.

“Grandpop, too,” Marie said. “She doesn’t like to show she’s upset in front of him.”

Jeanne, straining to sever a thick stem with her miniature shears, nodded.

Later in the day, the other families showed up with their baskets and sacks of grapes, some driving and others on foot; the massive crowd scattered over the yard. Everyone helped unload the harvest from the backs of cars and carts; the town was one extended family. Many of the first generation, like Marie and Jeanne’s grandparents, wore the same dark trousers and dresses of the rusetane in their namesake village, Roseto Valfortore in southern Italy. Some of the older ladies wore kerchiefs over their hair, and crucifixes swung from their plain-fronted bosoms. Outside the hills of the Slate Belt, Pennsylvania, the Rosetans would have stuck out as peculiar and backward. Many who had arrived thirty or forty years earlier never learned English, nor left the communities of Roseto and Bangor until their deaths.

Along the mash pit, plucking grapes from stems and tossing the fruit over the stone ledge, were the middle-aged children: the girls in pinafore dresses, the boys in striped shirts. Marie and Jeanne were wearing identical flour sack dresses with the gristmill’s imprint facing inside-out, a clever invention of Antonette’s. The stock market crash had only worsened the daily struggle to earn a living. The sisters, barefoot, eyed the tempting, slick interior of the pit; Cousin Addie had already swung one leg over the wall, poised to slide down for a secret-stomp. Only the teenagers were deemed old enough to crush the grapes. Antonette was peeling potatoes on the porch steps; a few feet away, Philip played a game with a cousin, tossing grapes to each other and catching them with their mouths.

Grandpop Capone always said that Philip looked just like their uncle Frank. It seemed like every time the children visited their grandfather and his wife, Carmel, Michele Capone acted out the same ritual. Resting a hand on each child’s head like he was playing Duck-duck-goose, he announced, in a tone of great surprise, that Marie looked like her father, Louie, tall and skinny—Grandpop had given Marie the name Little Spider-Legs. To Jeanne he proclaimed that she looked like her mother because both had the same reddish-brown hair. When their little sister Helen was alive, he’d said Helen looked just like him as a baby, round and dark. But the harvest marked the first time the Sabatine children had seen their grandfather or the other relatives since June. That was when Helen had died. Today when they’d shown up, Grandpop had touched their heads but not made his usual jokes. He told their mother how happy he was to see her, and that she needed to eat more. She replied he was lucky she was standing there and alive in the first place, and would be luckier still if she lived to see thirty-two that November. Grandpop had put his arm around her and said something low, but she shrugged it off, saying, “We’re not having any more, anyway.”

“That’s enough,” Antonette called to Philip. He stuck a finger in a curling strand of potato peel and lifted it, grinning. Up and down the vineyard rows, kids were running and hiding. Cars and trucks were lined up to where the road disappeared around the bend, the last of the Rosetans to join the celebration.

Marie kept one eye on her grapes, the other on Antonette, who was gathering the potatoes. Sitting on the porch steps was a woman from church rocking a toddler to sleep. Antonette chased after several potatoes that had rolled onto the grass, not looking up. When Jeanne had been the May Queen that spring at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and Helen the flower girl, Antonette had ushered her daughters away from the crowd of adoring parishioners as soon as the ceremony was over and a polite appearance over coffee and cookies had been made; she had possessed the same skittish demeanor and preoccupied look. On the walk home, Marie asked her mother what was the matter. They had never left church in such a hurry before. Antonette said only that she had spotted too many looks of envy among the mothers—“It must have been the skirts.” She had made Jeanne and Helen identical dresses with embroidered flowers on the hems. Marie remained silent, puzzled. At home, their father in the backyard, Antonette performed a strange ritual at the kitchen table. She set out a pair of scissors and a fork, filled a pan with water and oil. Eyes closed and head bent as if praying, she muttered some phrases they couldn’t understand in Italian, her back to them, waved a hand over the pan in a gesture Marie couldn’t quite make out, then tossed the liquid out the door. Returning inside she looked at them as if realizing that they’d been watching the whole time. She knelt down and smoothed their foreheads. “Someone put the malocchio on baby Helen,” she said, lips quivering. “But don’t worry. I got rid of it.”

Then their father walked in, picked up the scissors and tossed them back down. The scissors skidded in a circle before stopping. “Not again,” he said.

Antonette stood up slowly, looking from him to the table and back to him. She placed a hand on each daughter’s shoulder, squeezing. “There are things more powerful in this world than what you can see, Louie,” she said. Marie and Jeanne knew what she meant by the stories their grandfather told from the other Roseto in Italy—of werewolves, witches, and talking animals.

Later, when everywhere in the house was dark except for the kitchen, Marie and Jeanne overheard their parents arguing. “Oh, that spell doesn’t do any harm,” Antonette said. But Louie spoke in a scolding tone. This sent a shiver through Marie’s stomach because their father was a quiet, gentle man who loved to garden and read, and never raised his voice even to spank them, which was seldom. “You’re scaring them, don’t you see?” he said. “Those superstitions do more harm than you think.” He was wrong about that—it wasn’t the strange ritual that had been alarming but the way their mother had hurried away from church as if a fire blazed at their backs, and the jerky way she had yanked open the drawers and fumbled for the scissors and fork. They thought about it all summer after Helen died, especially Marie. Their father had called what their mother believed dangerous but only their mother offered any protection for their little sister.

Now Antonette balanced the pail of potatoes on her hip and surveyed the crowd before joining the aunts inside. The woman with the toddler said something and Antonette replied, but the look on her profile was the same it had been for months: blank.

Michele Capone’s homestead was a brick two-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch, barn, and several outbuildings. The porch faced the sloping mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania where the town of Roseto was nestled amongst the slate quarries. Michele hadn’t lived at the homestead for years, having moved to a busier street when he married Carmel, his second wife. But after a decade of renting out the farmhouse and his wine-making operation growing bigger every year, Michele finally convinced his wife that the homestead would better suit their needs. Louie Sabatine helped Michele build a new fermentation vat in the farmhouse basement that could hold a hundred gallons more than the one in the other house. The defining feature of the Capone’s property was the wine cellar; all of Roseto had been talking about it for months. On harvest day, Frank and Michele took turns showing off the cellar to visitors. Dozens of barrels large and small lined the walls, and the stainless steel vat rose up from the ground, the thick, sweet-stinking burgundy mash specked with skins. That year’s harvest, 1933, would mark the first with the new vat. Already the shiny interior was filling up as the men poured bucket after bucket of crushed grapes from the outdoor pit. While Louie had thrown his energies into constructing his father-in-law’s enormous vat for the past two months, Carmel, Michele’s wife, had tended to Antonette.

Carmel Capone had not been on happy terms with Antonette until that summer. After their sister’s death, Marie, Philip, and Jeanne would watch their mother sit in a chair and cry. Hours would go by, the children wondering when their mother would get up or stop crying, but she didn’t. After a week or two Antonette went back to work, but as soon as she came home would lock herself in the bedroom and not come out, no matter how long the children banged and called for her. Even when the bill collectors hovered at the front door, demanding money, and the kids ran for her, she didn’t respond. Almost eleven, Marie was too old; she’d hide in the hallway, nudge Philip and Jeanne to the door, where they’d shake their heads and pretend they only spoke Italian. Their father was working in the silk mill and building the vat; they might as well have been home alone.

That was when Carmel began to come around. She boiled water and chopped herbs, brought teas and poultices to their mother. The first words they overheard Antonette say to her stepmother were nasty, but then there was a muffled exchange through the door, and to their awe, it clicked open. The house stayed quiet. Eventually, the food on the trays Carmel brought in to their mother disappeared. The kids didn’t have to pretend anymore at the front door, because Carmel answered and said a few quiet words to the milkman or iceman, and nodding, he turned back down the walk.

Around the grape-pit, the kids were talking about certain relatives. “Carmel’s eyebrows look scarier than ever,” someone said. “Is she really a janare?”

“How’s your mother been?” Cousin Addie asked, a grape skin caught in her hair.

Everyone in Roseto knew what had happened. When a baby was born or someone died, friends and neighbors brought food, even if they barely had bread on their own tables. Everybody was poor, but everybody took care of one another. The Sabatines weren’t the first to lose a child suddenly, or to the “cold in the kidney,” either.

“She’s back at the blouse mill,” Marie said. “Our father’s been working on the house.” Between the garden and the back porch, Louie had laid a patio and sidewalk. He had replaced the weatherboards on the south side and repainted the whole two-stories himself. Every minute he was home he spent outdoors, refusing to come inside even for dinner. That July and August they ate every night on the patio, slapping mosquitoes underneath the awning. Marie guessed their father couldn’t stand to be in the house where Helen had died, and where Antonette barricaded herself after work, carrying out her living death.

Louie had other hobbies. He liked to read to Marie, Jeanne, and Phil. He listened to the radio, puffing on his tobacco pipe, and always made sure they were gathered around for their favorite detective show, featuring “The Shadow.” He had shushed them when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped the year before. He built new bedsteads and bookshelves with drawers. He had been making plans to add another small bedroom upstairs at the beginning of the summer. But they didn’t need the extra room now.

Helen had gotten sick the first week of June, a few days after the May Queen festival. Marie and Jeanne had been watching Helen all afternoon, and the three-year-old kept telling them she had to go to the bathroom. But every time they took her, Helen just sat on the toilet, panties down and legs swinging. Jeanne knelt there, imploring, “If you have to pee, go pee.” Marie fetched her mother and explained, “Nothing’s coming out.”

Antonette knelt by Helen. “Why do you keep telling your sisters you have to go if you don’t?” she asked. “Do you have to go?”

Helen nodded and hmm-hmmed, legs still swinging.

“Then why haven’t you gone?”

“Because I can’t,” Helen said in her small voice. Her legs stopped. Antonette pried her from the toilet seat, but midair, Helen started whimpering and kicking, begging her mother to put her back down. Antonette did, saying, “Leave her, then. I don’t know why she’s not going. But she’ll have to eventually.”

Marie teetered in the doorway. “But don’t you think that’s strange?” she said, and gulped, a nervous habit she had recently begun. Antonette breezed past with a shrug, saying Helen was probably just playing a game. Little kids that age always wanted attention. Nothing else seemed to be wrong with the little girl, and Antonette didn’t have time for such games. There was wash to do. Marie stuck to her spot at the door, said, “Are you sure?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “That seems like a strange game.” But their mother was already halfway down the hall, and didn’t hear.

The following night the Sabatines visited Antonette’s father and stepmother. Michele Capone lived only a few streets away, but for the entire walk back Helen complained that she felt tired and whined for someone to carry her. Louie had stayed home, and after an entire day of setting collars at the blouse mill, Antonette was tired herself; she could only carry the heavy three-year-old a few paces before she would have to set her down. They had just turned the corner onto their block when Helen drifted behind. Antonette looked back, and the toddler was squatting over the sidewalk. “What’s wrong?” Antonette called. “Come on.”

“I’m hot,” Helen wailed. “I don’t feel good.”

This time when Antonette scooped her up, she pressed the back of her hand to Helen’s cheek and felt the clammy heat.

At home, Marie, Jeanne, and Phil listened outside the kitchen door to their parents talking. Their father thought they should call the doctor. “Wasn’t she acting funny the other day?” he asked. But Antonette wanted to wait. The little girl had a fever but when Antonette prodded, nothing seemed to hurt. Helen showed no signs of a runny nose or cough. What was the doctor going to do, if there was nothing really wrong with her but a little fever and tiredness? Louie’s hands had broken out from handling the silk at his mill job again. Soon he would have to leave work. They already faced a summer of dwindling money and doctor’s bills. Waiting one more day to see if Helen got worse shouldn’t make much of a difference. Louie grew quiet, his gaze drifting over his blistered, reddened hands, and nodded.

That night when all the lights were out but their father’s bedside lamp and the overhead kitchen light, Marie crept halfway down the stairs. Antonette leaned over the kitchen table with the scissors, oil, and water laid out before her again, mouth forming the words to the chant.

Helen woke up wailing early the next morning, her dark curls plastered wet against her head and the skin around her eyes puffy. Louie and Antonette rushed around, Antonette trying to get the little girl to drink water, but Helen pushed the cup away. Louie ran to a neighbor’s to call the doctor. Marie, Jeanne, and Phil huddled in the hallway and watched through the door. Dr. Farace had a young, smooth face. His hands trembled as he snapped open the shiny medical bag. Helen was laid out on her parents’ bed and had grown eerily quiet and still. The doctor lifted her little nightgown and pressed her sides and stomach; she barely moaned and didn’t stir. Marie’s heart thudded so hard and fast, she felt like the whole house was pounding. “If she turns blue, call me,” the doctor said on his way out the door.

Jeanne’s fists were clutching Marie’s skirt, and Marie pried them off and wandered into their bedroom. Her head felt light and fuzzy, and the sunlight streaming in made everything seem to leer with an odd angularity—the roller skates in the corner, the hairbrush on the dresser. She flung herself on the bed, thinking, Helen is going to die. Their mother had made a terrible mistake. Sometimes waiting was the wrong thing to do. Her father hadn’t wanted to wait—why hadn’t he stood up to their mother? Helen had been fine just a few days ago. She was just starting to run around, to make them laugh. How stupid to think nothing was really wrong with her, that she was playing a game. Now it was too late.

Marie was propped on her elbows, her face wet. Through the window she glimpsed the doctor in jaunty stride crossing the street to the next block, when from the next room her mother screamed.

Over the next several days relatives and friends filled the house. The aunts, dressed in black, covered the mirrors and pictures with sheets. Helen’s little body was laid out in the flower girl dress everyone had just seen her wearing the previous week. Jeanne was not allowed to wear her matching dress. She, Marie, and Philip were dressed in drab colors. Neighbors brought hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches; their mother did not cook. Antonette barely moved from the chair next to the body, not even to light the stove. For three days and nights, she and the other women of the family wailed. The older zias came, relatives of the grandmother the children had never met, and sang haunting songs throughout the night in Italian.

On the third day, Marie and Jeanne were given little bouquets of flowers. Their mother, her face hidden by a black veil, tucked a small sack into the casket before it was closed. In silence except for the many footsteps on pavement, they followed the rest of the families behind the crawling hearse to the cemetery at the top of the hill.

The sun was hanging low in the mountains, and harvest day coming to a close. The zias called the children inside to help set the long picnic tables. Antonette was cooking gnocchi on the stove. Without looking up from her stirring, she instructed her daughters to bring out ice water and for Philip to bring up a small barrel of wine for dinner.

“You think Philip can bring up a barrel by himself?” Lucy asked Antonette.

“He’s a strong boy, he can carry it,” Antonette replied. “He’ll call if he needs help.”

“You’re lucky he’s so well-behaved,” Lucy said. “And the girls.”

“Yes, well,” Antonette said. “Marie cries a lot.”

The Saturday before, Carmel had driven up to the Sabatine’s in her pony-cart. She and Michele had just moved from the center of town to the homestead, and Michele had bought her the cart in exchange for her willingness to move. Antonette met her on the sidewalk and the two women spoke for a bit. When Antonette came inside, she told Marie to watch Philip and Jeanne. A baby was being born and Carmel, a mammane, was going to help with the delivery. She had asked if Antonette wanted to come.

Because Carmel was a midwife and knew about herbs and home remedies for illnesses did not mean she was a janare, as many in Roseto believed. Antonette explained this in more detail later, when she got home and Marie asked her why she had gone. Even Antonette had once believed her stepmother was a witch, but she was young and had misunderstood. Carmel thought it might help Antonette to get out of the house, and to learn more about bodily signs, natural remedies and herbs. Marie asked what the ladies did during the birth, and Antonette explained that some of the older ones went around the house opening doors and drawers and untying knots because they believed this ensured an easy delivery. The godma of the pregnant woman had laid out one of the husband’s trousers at the foot of the bed, saying this would bring his wife strength. But Carmel had dismissed most of these old customs. According to Antonette, Carmel believed that superstitions were just superstitions; wellness depended on the alignment of nature and the body. After the baby was born the neighbors and levatrici, including Carmel, washed the mother and baby and took away the afterbirth.

Later that week, another woman gave birth and Antonette brought the children along with her and Carmel. While the ladies were inside, the laboring woman crying and moaning upstairs, Marie, Philip, and Jeanne played in the yard. No one was around except for a few goats in a smelly shed out back. Families went to other relatives when women had babies. The kids swatted flies in the heat and played hopscotch near the tomato bed. Finally, Antonette appeared and climbed in the cart, but Carmel followed a trio of old women across the backyard. One of the women carried a shovel and started digging underneath a tree. Carmel turned around sharply and left. Picking up the reins, she said, “They won’t listen to me.” Marie stared at the old ladies underneath the tree as the cart pulled away. One of them tipped a basin over the hole and something slippery and purple, like a nest of blood, slid into the dirt.

“What’s that they put into the ground?” Marie asked.

Antonette explained about the afterbirth, and the kids made faces. To Carmel, she asked, “What about the cord?”

“That’s different,” Carmel said. “You still keep that. I wrap them in cotton to dry them out.”

“To put in the coffin, yes? When someone passes away?”

“For now, yes. Don’t throw it away.” There was a pause, nothing but the pony’s clop-clopping on the street, then Carmel added, “One day people will save that for other reasons—it is human flesh, you see? It contains new life. Someone will discover that it can help others who have diseases, make them well. You think I’m crazy, what I’m telling you?” She twisted around to glance at the children in the back. “A hundred years from now, medicine is where people will put their faith. Not the churches.” She and Antonette exchanged a look, Carmel’s thick eyebrows arching.

Philip Sabatine hopped down the cellar steps two at a time. The light was flooding over every inch of the space. The cover had been left off the vat, the dark purple mash foaming and sticking to the silver walls. He scooted past the crater and picked out a barrel on the lowest shelf. But when he tugged, he misjudged his eight-year-old strength, and the barrel shot from the space like a cork from a bottle. The force propelled him backwards, into the vat. The mash enveloped him like quicksand. He tried but he couldn’t move his limbs, the weight was so heavy. When his toes scraped bottom, he struggled to break the surface, sucking both air and grape skins through his mouth, and gagged. He choked out a yell before he was once again pulled to suffocating blackness.

Carmel heard the yell. Antonette had just taken a potato in her mouth, lost in the numbness that had enshrouded her since Helen’s death, and her stepmother’s dash jarred her from the trance. One of the kids had fallen in the wine vat, meaning Philip. Men raced down the steps, Carmel and Antonette at their heels. By the time the two women reached the bottom, the boy stood at the foot of the steps, gasping and shaking, and purple from head to toe. Someone shouted for towels. Carmel went to fetch them, said to bring Philip up into the fresh air. As soon as she reached her son, Antonette clung and did not let go. She, too, fought to breathe. The uncles lifted the boy and carried him out to the porch, relatives parting to make room, the other children wide-eyed. Grape juice and skins dripped from his hair and clothes, leaving a trail on the floor. Outside, twilight had fallen, the picnic tables aglow with lanterns; women were setting out trays of pasta. Seeing Philip, Louie cut through the yard and tossed aside his pipe. Lucy and Josephine brought towels, warm water and a bucket of soap. “Give him a chance to breathe first,” Carmel said, hovering. “Then take him to the grass and clean him up.”

Philip sat on the porch steps, hugging his knees, mother and father on either side. Louie wiped the mash from his son’s face, and Philip sneezed a few times. Gradually, the crowd thinned and people wandered over to the tables. Antonette didn’t say a word but rocked, moaning to herself. Marie and Jeanne watched from a few feet away, too frightened to get any closer. Finally, Louie picked up Phil and brought him around the side of the house. He stripped off the boy’s clothes and scrubbed the stained skin.

Everyone else had taken their seats, except Marie and Jeanne, Carmel and Antonette. Carmel had brought Antonette a glass of water and told her to drink it. Antonette was still rocking, clutching her sides, and once in a while the girls caught pieces of what she was saying: that she had been careless by not paying attention to Philip; that she couldn’t go on, if she lost another one, she would kill herself. Carmel was next to her on the step, her arm around Antonette’s shoulders so tightly that Marie could see the nails pinching her mother’s sleeves. Carmel nodded and said, “I lost three. But there was Lucy.” She looked up, at Marie and Jeanne who were staring. “You find a way.”

Later, after the tables were bare and the last of the headlights disappeared down the road, Marie sat on the porch steps with Philip, whose hair was still damp. Here and there, spots and streaks of grape stain peeked out from his bare skin. One of the cousins had lent him clothes which were too baggy, and the neck gaped. For a long time, they sat and didn’t say anything.

“I thought I was going to die,” Philip said. “In the vat.”

“But you didn’t,” Marie said.

“I was going to, if Uncle Frank hadn’t pulled me out.”

“That’s true,” she said. “What did it feel like?”

He thought for a moment, the chorus of crickets filling the air. “Like being swallowed,” he said. “I couldn’t breathe. It was scary.”

“Well, we’ll look out for each other more. Jeanne, too.”

He was looking at his hands, turning them over. The half-moons underneath his fingernails looked bloody from the dried mash. “I miss Helen,” he said.

“Well, you’re not going to die anytime soon,” Marie said. She put an arm around her brother and thought, one day I’ll have a family of my own, with lots of kids. We’ll never run out of love for one another.

September wore on. The kids went back to school: Marie into sixth grade, Philip into fourth, and Jeanne into first. With his hands still blistered from his allergy to the silk, Louie Sabatine butchered the pigs early. Saturdays, the kids helped their father hang the hams and sausages on a clothesline in the attic where the meat would dry. The kids hated to hear the pigs squeal, but the meat would feed them throughout the winter. Their father was quiet and almost underfoot; he barely let them out of his sight. On the day the butchering was over, he mentioned how much he’d like a beer. Marie said she’d run up to the corner store and bring him one, and he seemed to consider this carefully before saying yes, when last spring he would have handed her the quart jar with a wink and told her to get him some tobacco, too, for his pipe—a habit their mother loathed.

No one talked about Helen anymore. It was almost as if she had never existed. But every now and then Marie stumbled upon one of the little hair barrettes in a drawer, or a toy. And sometimes she would shut herself in her room and cry.

Antonette worked all week and half-days on Saturday too. She picked up the extra hours without complaint, and when Louie told her she didn’t have to work so much, she said they needed the money. One Saturday afternoon when Antonette had only been home a few minutes, Carmel Capone trotted up in her pony-cart. Marie and Jeanne were working on their embroidery, which they had to finish before they could go out and play. Antonette slowly descended the walk. Marie felt her spirits lift: if their mother went somewhere, she and Jeanne could roller skate. Carmel said something and Antonette shook her head, her “no, no,” drifting through the window. The girls caught patches of the conversation on the breeze, the leaves already beginning to fall and tumbling over the sidewalks. Carmel seemed like she had someplace to go, yet lingered. The pony shook his head up and down and stamped the road with his hoof. The whole world felt impatient, restless. “You can’t live that way,” Carmel said. The wind lifted her hair, and the girls could see her thick eyebrows knit together.  “You must forgive yourself, or the bitterness will replace the love in your heart.”

Antonette shifted in her stance, said, “I just want to work, take care of my family. Isn’t that enough, for now?”

The cart clattered off. Antonette paced, her hands pressed into her lower back like a woman in the pains of labor.

“Harvest” first appeared in Louisiana Literature, Vol 30, No. 2, (2013).

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Vanessa Blakeslee’s latest book, Perfect Conditions: stories won the Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for the Short Story (2018). Blakeslee is also the author of Train Shots: stories and Juventud, a novel, both of which received prizes and accolades. Her writing has appeared in The Southern Review, The Paris Review Daily, Kenyon Review Online, Joyland, The Smart Set, and many other places. She has been awarded grants and residencies from Yaddo, The Banff Centre, Ledig House/Writers Omi, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Individual Artist Fellowship in Literature from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and many more. Blakeslee has taught for the MFA in Writing programs at Goddard College and the City University of Hong Kong, and currently teaches at the University of Central Florida.

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