In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)

May 31, 2025

“Feathered Friends” by Claudia Tong

farmhouse elegy

By Molly Wadzeck

K and I dig holes, at least three feet deep, holes to fill with dead chickens, reciting names if we recognize what remains of their charred, limp bodies. Ash is still falling from her house’s second-story skeleton. Her yard, recently teeming with life, the host of campfires and stories whispered into warm ears over warm beer, has never been this quiet; now, only the creek pierces through our grunting, our heavy sighs, the scraping of parched earth torn apart by metal.

When K purchased the white, fixer-upper farmhouse, what were presumed to be an old home’s quirks quickly became disquieting. She’d walk downstairs to discover open cupboards, rearranged canned goods, a door ajar. Soon she’d learn the previous tenant had died alone in the home, no next of kin or close friends to mourn or preserve evidence of his existence.

“He died two years ago on the day I signed my deed,” K told me. “I think he’s here because he wants to make sure whoever bought it was a good steward.”

*

On the bedrock of the creek, water cascades over our dirt-caked legs as we inspect each other’s skin for ticks. We lament the swift and ruthless nature of fire. How the smoke warned the neighbors, how the fifteen-minute drive was too long to do anything but stand and watch, how the flames sashayed across the roofline and jumped, crackling and popping against the midnight sky, swallowing surrounding noise across the hill, a ravenous beast hissing stay away. 

“Do you think I let him down?” K asks.

“Maybe he’s the one who started the fire,” I joke. 

Laughter emerges—feeding us, carrying her down the narrow stairwell once more, holding her hand into the kitchen where she danced and baked and dreamed, through the screen door and toward a new beginning, constructed atop a burial ground. 

“Or maybe he’s the one who kept you safe, made sure you weren’t home.”

“I would have tried to save them all. The dogs, the cat, the birds…”

“I know,” I say.

I know.

*

A week later, K sent a barrage of worried texts to my confiscated phone at the hospital’s mental health unit. It was my turn to be haunted, envisioning my body as an offering, relieving my loved ones from the trauma, worry, and exasperation I’d inflicted, swallowing wine and pills, longing for rest. 

“You always have to one-up me,” she joked. 

“I couldn’t let you have all the attention.” 

Our hazy lungs and residual burns tell the story. Not the whole story, but the part where the ghosts queued at the door, presenting versions of futures for which we weren’t prepared, we’d never imagined. Before the fire, After the psych ward—timestamps, reconsidered. I tried measuring the relief in circumstance that kept her safe against my decision to walk into the flames. But if I couldn’t make sense of it, I’m not sure K would be able to either.

Instead, we make iced coffee. We hike through the gorge to the waterfall, unfolding rocks in search of salamanders along the way. We share salads in matching wooden bowls, little accent carvings surprising our fingertips; fresh bitter garden greens, farmer’s market cherry tomatoes, homemade goddess dressing, topped with sunflower seeds. We text jokes about town gossip and animal photos. 

I refrain from discussing the house; she avoids mentioning the hospital. We waltz like this, over the smoldering coals, slinking past years, running into another dimension—strangers in a place so familiar. 

“I miss you,” she tells me.

“I know,” I say.

I know.

Molly Wadzeck’s work has been published in X-R-A-Y, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, among others. Her creative nonfiction, an Editor's Choice Award winner, was nominated for a Best of the Net award in 2022. She is working on a memoir.