The night Mamaw got sick, the rain fell and froze. I heard my father get out of bed and head to the vineyard to try and save the grapes. I heard the worry in his voice, frayed as old flannel. By morning the vines were trapped in ice. When the sun came out, our world looked like a bowl full of diamonds. My mother slipped Mamaw’s ring from her finger and tucked it in a scrap of velvet left over from a dress she’d made me. The grapes were buried under coffins of ice, as perfect as pearls.
Sarah Freligh is the author of seven books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize, Hereafter, winner of the 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash Contest, and the recently-released Other Emergencies. Her work has appeared many literary journals and anthologized in New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), and Best Microfiction (2019-22). Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.
'Ghost Grapes' was first published in Splonk, Issue One (2019).
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