It’s time to divide and transplant the winter-dormant residents of Bellamy’s garden. The shovel and she work as one: slice and step and scoop. Gloves on, hair back. Low sun slants across the sleeping plants. A fern over there will flourish here; she prepares a hole for it in the space where the yellow magnolia once lived. A foot down, her shovel becomes an axe, severing subterranean roots that persist despite the absence of the tree. Bellamy hacks at the spent arteries of a friendship that no longer beats.
She bought the magnolia ten years ago, thinking it was rare. Her best friends had one, the only yellow magnolia Bell had ever seen. Theirs grew prettily in their yard. Bellamy passed by it when they invited her for dinner. She brought bottles of wine and pajama-clad children, ate too much and stayed too late. They laughed a lot. This went on for years. On her way home, she’d say goodbye to their yellow magnolia tree as if it, too, was a friend.
Bellamy planted her own magnolia in the corner of her garden where she now excavates its roots. The trunk of the young tree forked and leaned, it rarely bloomed. Over the years it suffered the indignities of her gardening-good intentions: staking and pruning and fertilizer-transfusing. The friendship and her tree withered so gradually that she hadn’t asked questions. With all the children grown, conversations with those friends turned awkward. Their invitations stopped. Then they moved away last year, under the cover of busy lives. From neighborhood gossip Bell heard they were looking for another home, but their departure still came as a surprise. “These things happen quickly,” her friends said when she came across them loading the moving van. Bellamy made herself wish them farewell with a smile before returning to her own home to cry in the toolshed.
The new owners do not tend that original tree. Sometimes when she’s out for a walk, Bell sees it, overgrown and unrecognizable through the fence she passed through. She fights the urge to introduce herself to the new residents, to offer her knowledge of how not to care for the once well-tended yellow magnolia. And to tell them of the many happy hours she spent in what is now their house, thinking that a friendship would last and grow like a rare tree.
Six feet down, Bellamy breaks through a final tangle of dry roots. Tosses them into the compost. She makes up her mind to stop walking past that house. Backfills the hole with compost and drags the fern to its new home. A fern is a sensible plant; no one would ever call it too good to be true.
A car stops at the intersection and a lady she doesn’t know lowers the passenger window. “Why did you remove your yellow magnolia?” the stranger asks, well-intentioned and nosey. “They’re rare, you know.” “It died,” says Bellamy, and it feels good to say it. She grips her shovel, squints. “It turns out, they’re not rare.” She waves to the stranger and returns to the fern. Lowers the rootball into place, scrapes soil around it. The hole brings to mind a tooth knocked out. Or a bruise that heals by first turning black, then blue-green, before fading to yellow. Bellamy puts away her shovel and awaits the time when the fern flourishes and she forgets that a magnolia ever grew here.
Wendy A. Warren’s short stories and essays have appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, HerStry, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, Birdland Journal, and elsewhere. Wendy is a 2025 Mineral Arts & Residencies recipient and is represented by the Georges Borchardt Literary Agency. She lives in Seattle, Washington where she tends her family and a history-filled urban garden. Read more at wendyawarren.com.
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