“Pure” originally appeared in Hemingway Shorts 6 published by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. This story was a finalist for the 2021 Hemingway Shorts Prize.
Pure
By Margot Douaihy
It’s what they wanted—a real life doing real work. A real kitchen table of reclaimed wood from a derelict mill. Resurrection in action. Enough room for ten. And soon Ruth and April would make friends, there would be more bodies, loudmouths, jokes, and mimosa toasts, pancakes drenched in homemade syrup during boozy brunches at their farm.
But it was just them that sugaring season, married for five years and still feeling like newlyweds after their whiplash move north. Hard to admit that the magnificent kitchen table was too big for the space, and so heavy the women couldn’t move it. They had to shimmy sideways, holding their breath, collapsing their bodies to fit.
Ruth sat at the infinite table, scribbling the crossword answers—geodesic, Uruguay, Burgesses—that April had missed. Ruth hated using blue ink while April had used black, but she didn’t want to get up and hunt for another pen.
April was at the stove frying bacon: a portion for one? Or two? Ruth glanced up from the paper but couldn’t tell, and she was stunned April assumed she would want bacon too, given that Ruth was vegan for nine years. But when April eventually sat down, Ruth leaned over, stretched out tentative fingers, and pincered one strip of bacon from the greasy plate.
“Good.” April’s green eyes beamed. “We're farmers now. Vegan utopia doesn’t track, does it?”
“Maple farmers.” Ruth draped a cloth napkin over her lap.
“Still,” April said. “Flesh deliciousness forever!”
“Maybe not with the gloating?” Ruth cleared her throat and ate the bacon, swallowing it without chewing.
“You love my bravado,” April smiled.
“No,” said Ruth, “just your body.”
An hour later the women were outside in the sugar woods with their tools, pickaxe, and silver buckets.
“First the tips, then the tapping,” April instructed, squealing as sap ran down the maple’s shiny lichen. “It’s working!”
“Darling, you’re going to break your wrist,” Ruth warned. “Don’t we need help? Experts?”
“You always do this. You say you’re on board, but you’re not. Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course, baby.” Ruth took April’s gloved hands in hers.
February air felt punitive to Ruth. More than cold, like it wanted revenge. Ruth blinked away wind tears eyes as she carried their beagle Wolfie from the house to the sugar shack so he could be near his moms while they worked. Old Wolfie was so riddled with arthritis, Ruth and April ferried him around like a sleepy toddler, talking to him quietly.
Their one trip to Massachusetts last year, for a friend’s wedding, cemented the desire to make the move from Brooklyn to Great Barrington, a quirky, time-warp town where you could still rent VHS tapes. It was a hamlet surrounded by forests, farms, and mosaic of mountains. April noticed a listing for a maple farm for sale, three miles from downtown. Even with its seven acres, the farmhouse, and the quintessential sugar shack with room for equipment, the property was a fraction of their roach-dark Brooklyn railroad. April called the listing agent. Within six months they started a new life.
For as punishingly cold as it was outside, it was so steamy inside the sugar shack the women shed their flannels and wore only tank tops with jeans. Sap flowed down the pipes, into the floatboxes for boiling. April gathered her long black hair into an unruly bun. She had to take breaks, stepping outside to breathe, even fainting once because of the unforgiving heat, and Ruth carried her, then Wolfie, outside, into the relief of ice air.
“Breathe in,” Ruth said, “breathe out,” with long exhales, modeling the actions as she said them.
🍁
Ruth was precise and tough, with a practiced brand of strength. For all of her urbanity—eyebrows waxed into perfect arcs, Pilates arms, discerning taste—Ruth surrendered to winter, learning the crucible of the woods in ways April would not. April was too green, a too emotional. Only Ruth knew how the forest marries death and life. How unseen creatures own the night. How fire sleeps inside stone.
🍁
Patterns of steam latticed the interior walls of shack, and above, a little storm collected, puffs of sweet fog. The women had finished their last batch in their syrup line and stacked jugs and glass bottles on the counter. Grade A Medium and Dark. Grade B Medium and Dark. Purer Than Pure, their signature grade.
Ruth disappeared for a moment and returned carrying a surprise in her tattooed arms, a hand-painted wooden sign finished that morning.
April’s Pure Maple, the sign proclaimed, with a tiny maple leaf for the apostrophe.
“So pretty,” said April, shaking her head, staring at the sign as if it might walk away any second.
“Hope it’s okay,” said Ruth as she kissed her wife’s hand, “that I make all your dreams come true.”
🍁
Ever since the women met, a decade ago, a random brush at LEGS—the old New York, when lesbian bars still existed, those mauve walls, regrettable cocktails, and make-out corners—April had itched for a change. She was desperate to escape the vise-grip of the city, find her passion. Or any passion. She hated the twelve-hour shifts in the animation studio, lunch eaten at her desk or standing over the sink. One day swirling into the next with no break. Ruth wasn’t bothered by brutal rent or the city’s intensity. She like challenges, she pursued them—sommelier certification, life coach certification, CrossFit, raw veganism—whether she excelled or failed.
🍁
“Can’t believe we open tomorrow,” April said into the mirror as the women washed their faces and brushed their teeth. April was bone tired, could barely lift her arms. “I feel like a corpse.”
“Oh, God.” Ruth stared at April blankly.
“No, no. It’s a good tired.”
“As long as you’re happy,” said Ruth, her voice soft as a wish. “I want you to be happy.” She removed April’s toothbrush from her hand, started brushing April’s front teeth for her.
“Weird,” said April after spitting, “but you’re cute when you’re weird.”
“Now you’ll think of me whenever you brush your teeth,” said Ruth.
Wolfie’s long nails clicked against the wood floor as he walked into the women’s bedroom. He slept on his red dog bed next to a box of Ruth’s old wine-tasting plaques and sommelier diploma, still rolled in its tube.
🍁
It wasn’t April who woke first on opening day, but Ruth. Before dawn soaked the forest in bronze, Ruth rose with a start, splashed cold water on her face, brushed her thick blond hair, and tiptoed downstairs in her flannel shirt, pajama pants still on.
The music from the windchimes sounded deliberate, as if knuckles were clanging the chimes one by one.
Outside, Ruth grabbed the wood sign and supplies, and walked to the scenic hill you could see from the road. April will love how this plays on Instagram, she thought. She made a charcoal fire to thaw the ground so she could drive the post-hole blades into the hard soil. When she was done, she straightened the sign, stepped back, and turned.
Ruth looked—at it.
🍁
It was August when they moved to Massachusetts, when Ruth had dug through the hill’s loamy earth to plant heliotrope. A symbol of love and pure devotion, yet toxic for dogs, so safely out of Wolfie’s smell zone. But as she dug deep to drop new heliotrope into the old earth, Ruth’s shovel hit something, as if the dirt was pushing back. She saw gray. No, white. A skull. Bones. A few, enough. And red plastic. It could have been trash. Or wrist restraints, with their precise placement over bone. Material that never breaks down, never disappears, no matter how deep it’s buried. The remains made Ruth drop to her knees and throw up. She emptied her body until she was clean. For a moment she could not see. Nothing was hard or soft. The ground fell away.
In the weeks that followed, as they painted and unpacked, arranged and rearranged, Ruth was dazed and forgetful. Every day, she punched in the phone number for the police into her phone, but never pressed call. When April cried with bloodwebbed eyes, “I knew you’d hate it here!” for the third night in a row, and Ruth made her decision. Police on the land would ruin everything, cast a hex over their new life. Their farm excavated. April’s dream stained before it began.
The body would stay underground, silent as radon.
Ruth carefully placed cinderblocks over the grave, a few feet from the sign. When the season turned, she laid concrete, then pavers. An elegant walkway.
She circled the grave twice. It looked like nothing.
She would make it nothing.
🍁
Inside the house, Ruth’s face was as white as an old scar. “Sign’s up,” she said.
April’s eyes sparked with worry. “Babe, you look terrible.”
“Thanks,” Ruth scoffed.
“I mean, you look sick. You okay?”
“Tired. Wolfgang Amadeus was wheezing all night. Let’s get dressed. Customers will be here soon.”
“But—”
Ruth walked upstairs, two steps ahead of April, then three, the wood of each step buckling under her weight. Without turning, Ruth asked, as if the empty air could hold the question, “Don’t you trust me?”
❍❍❍
Margot Douaihy is the author of four books including Scorched Grace (Gillian Flynn Books, 2023) and Bandit/Queen: The Runaway Story of Belle Starr (Clemson University Press, 2022). Reprinted with permission from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.