The entire length of the Tobacco Parade had nearly passed her by, and Iris was certain she had nothing else to look forward to. She had barely seen the parade to begin with. After a late arrival, a crowd of people blocked her view of the street: tall men with their short wives, children weaving between their parents’ legs, all packed onto the tiny patch of grass at the center of town square. Some milled about—they chatted with old friends, or sought out a spot of shade—but most stayed glued to their spots, admiring whatever minor distraction the parade offered. A blare of tubas and trombones smeared the air. It was the Palace High School marching band; Iris recognized snatches of their uniforms between the shoulders of other onlookers.

She reached down and touched her granddaughter, Mare, on the shoulder. Of course, it occurred to her—if her own view was bad, the girl’s must’ve been doubly so at least. Iris felt bad. There were other children nearby, hiked up on their parents’ shoulders, standing tall above everyone else. But Iris’s shoulders couldn’t bear this, not at her age—for years now, she woke with a weary ache in her bones that plagued her sunup to sundown. But she couldn’t just let the girl stand there bored either. Mare’s eyes no longer tried for a glimpse of the parade—they were locked instead on the ground under her feet. A widow now for two years, Iris counted her only granddaughter as maybe the last good thing left in her life. Days out with her like this were a rare moment of sweetness. Now, though, she couldn’t help but feel as though she’d blown the whole thing. The marching band had traveled some up the road, quieter now, but still loud enough to mute Iris’s thoughts as she tried to puzzle out a solution. After a minute or so, she thought to herself, Fuck it, and leaned down to grab Mare’s hand. “What do you say we butt our way up front?”

Together, they stepped forward and lodged their bodies into the press of people up ahead, Iris’s hand latched over Mare’s all the while. Despite the mid-September chill, she could smell the collective sweat of the crowd as she squeezed past the clot of their dozen bodies, their skin sliming up hers as she grazed their arms and necks. She said her kindnesses—“Excuse me,” and, “Pardon me”—but she knew it was no good. Folks were likely to later complain to one another about Iris Hartley’s bout of public rudeness. What did she care, though, so long as she constructed a good memory for Mare in the meantime.

They made their way up front in time to catch the tail end of a lineup of drum majorettes, the twirl of their batons overhead glimmering in the sun. Next up was a horde of Corvettes from the factory two counties over, each a polished shade of red or white. The drivers leaned on their horns as they meandered past. People cheered in response, loud and then louder still when one driver chucked a few handfuls of candy their way. Mare brightened as she leaned down to pick up what she could, timid among the pack of children who likewise pounced at the candy. At last, Iris felt a moment of relief wash through her whole body—it sank from her chest and spread to the furthest reaches of her limbs. Up till now, she’d worried the girl’s boredom might soon edge into the same quiet resentment that her daughter Anna had been collecting like sandstone since her childhood days.

Mare was eight years old, stout but surprisingly fragile for a kid her age. In all respects she was an introverted kid, with the curious tendency to shell herself off from the world despite having seen so little of it. When pressed by strangers to talk, she would respond with an almost aggressive quiet, her eyes big and brown and rheumy from below, as though on the brink of tears. Around Iris, she would talk—usually—although only in brief enough snatches that Iris never could be sure what the girl was feeling. In this way, she was the opposite of her mother. No, Anna had always felt everything so strongly, had never shied away from speaking her mind even—or perhaps especially—when others weren’t ready to hear it. It had been this trait of her daughter’s that had made Iris disconnect from her when she was younger. She had never been able to contain herself when the girl would blow up out of nowhere, and had reacted in ways equally loud and certainly more violent. She wasn’t proud of this. In fact, she hoped to make up for all those indiscretions now, with Mare. Iris watched as Mare shoved the green head of a sucker into her mouth and felt a pang of hopefulness.

A few moments later there came down the road the low, steady rumble of a tractor. It was wide and orange, with rear tires taller than Mare, flecked at all angles with smutches of mud. The driver, a silver-haired man about Iris’s age, waved to people as he approached, a blank-eyed smile pasted to his face. Mare peered up at the man and leaned her weight against Iris’s leg, one hand fisted over the stem of her sucker.

The air hummed with pleasant, familiar sounds: the distancing bray of several car horns, the buzz of surrounding conversation. Loudest of all was the shake of the tractor’s engine as it jostled past Iris and Mare, a sputtering growl down the road. Once it inched its way past, something in the air shifted—the engine again, only more irregular now, as though faltering. The tractor bucked a little—one large hydraulic bounce—but the driver fiddled with some levers to press on. Iris moved her eyes to the fleet of trucks approaching behind.

Then there was an eruption—a loud crash as the tractor’s engine hammered and shut down, bringing the whole thing to a halt in its course. A few people let out screams at the suddenness of it all, but these soon dissipated into stray giggles as one by one people noticed the driver, still in his seat, coughing and wafting away the exhaust billowing from out the machine’s air stack.

The tractor was stuck. A few men stepped forward to help tinker with its engine, the driver standing by, incredulous. The looping street of town square was narrow, hardly wide enough to hold two lanes of traffic, so the busted-up tractor stalled the parade’s last few attractions. Iris spotted the trucks and banners left behind in its wake.

As the minutes began to add up and the crowd dispersed around her, Iris didn’t budge. It struck her as unfair for this to happen on this of all days, after she had worked so hard for this afternoon out with Mare. She had spent an hour on the phone arguing with Anna for permission, had gotten her way only when she burst into tears, and now this faulty tractor was set to ruin it all. It couldn’t be. All day long—but now more than ever—her lungs thirsted for a cigarette, but Anna had made her swear she wouldn’t smoke in front of the girl. Her body tense with stress, she gawked at the tractor, at the cluster of men taking turns under its hood. Around her, conversations accumulated as people walked away: some jeered the man as a poor driver, others expressed hope the Tobacco Parade might be better next year. Either way, the parade’s premature end affected Iris as the ending of something that had only just begun, and she felt determined, for now, to hold out for more.

“Grandma?” It was Mare’s voice coursing its way to the front of the surrounding bustle. “Can we leave now too?”

Though disappointed, Iris had to hand it to Mare: there was little point in staying now. Again she took the girl’s hand and set off in the opposite direction of the parade, away from the square, past the final remaining spectators, some of whose faces were sunk in disappointment, others lit up in anger. On the other side of the Palace Courthouse, they turned the corner onto a residential street lined with trees. Iris paused in front of an abandoned shotgun apartment to give her knees a rest.

“Grandma, look,” Mare said as she plugged her tongue out her mouth. “Is my tongue all green?”

Iris laughed and smoothed a thumb along the curve of Mare’s jaw, then she grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her into a hug. It was something she did often with Mare, an urge she couldn’t resist. The affection surprised her every time; she had never been so effusive when Anna was a little girl. With Anna she had always doled out love in portions, like sliced-off quarters of an apple. It wasn’t until recent years that she realized it had been this as much as anything that had halted the forward track of their relationship, and she felt determined not to let that happen with Mare, whose warmth in that moment was all she needed to feel okay in her skin. Not even a cigarette would have felt as good, she thought.

When Mare began to squirm, Iris released her and looked down at her. Probably she should take the girl home now, she thought, back to Anna, but she couldn’t stand the thought of their stilted goodbye at the front door. Besides, without Mare, she’d be forced to return to her own empty house across town, and what would she do with herself then? She bent her neck to peer at the sky. All day long the clouds had threatened rain, gray at the edges and wispy, but for now it was sunny enough.

“What say you and me go to the park?” she said. Never one to refuse, Mare nodded. Beside her grandmother, Mare walked with slow, cadenced steps as they moved beneath the tall, stripped maples that lined the road toward the park.

“I know we couldn’t see much,” Iris said. “But did you have fun at the parade?”

Mare thought for a second. “Not much. It was only a bunch of cars and stuff.”

Well, Iris thought, there was no denying that. The town used to celebrate the Tobacco Parade with a full-blown festival, with stages for bluegrass music, and grills pluming the air with the scents of burgers and ribs. They were a treasure among her memories of girlhood, those festivals, the whole town infused with life and color for one brief afternoon each year. This year marked her first return since Anna was a teenager, so it struck her as a shock to walk across town with Mare only to sit lifeless among a crowd as the parade went by. Could be that it was just an off year, but more likely than not, the festivals of her girlhood were a thing of the past. Palace had nothing so good to offer anymore. It was as though, somewhere along the way, all the accumulated events of her life had piled into place behind her when she wasn’t looking; those left ahead of her, she figured, were only liable to disappoint.

“Why do we have a parade for tobacco anyhow?” Mare said as they crossed someone’s lawn.

“It’s Kentucky’s cash crop. We’re supposed to come together and celebrate, to honor the harvest.”

“Momma says tobacco will kill you.”

Iris kicked a rock on the sidewalk out of her way. She thought of Anna saying this to Mare and recalled the bitter sound of their years-long arguments about smoking, how Anna used to fill the house with shouting each time Iris lit a cigarette. Of course, when she thought of her daughter’s face, Iris only craved a cigarette all the more.

“Tobacco can hurt you, sure,” she told Mare. “But you can’t deprive people either.”

Two blocks down the road, they crossed the street into Palace’s only public park—a vast, open plot of land. On the mown grass there were swing sets and teeter-totters set into vague motion by the breeze, all spaced apart so you could run a good distance between them. Iris had assumed that because of the parade, they’d have the park to themselves, but she was wrong; a band of children swung from the beams of a jungle gym ahead of them. The kids’ playful screams greeted them as they entered, a high-pitched shrill that charted toward them from up ahead.

“Do you want to play with the other kids?”

Even before Mare shook her head no, Iris knew her answer. Pleased to keep Mare to herself for now, Iris instead guided her granddaughter away from the jungle gym, toward a creek across the way.

The creek spanned the length of the park’s northern edge, twisting around the corner to mark a border between the park and the empty farmland on the opposite side. It was narrow, flanked with mud and crags of rock. A pulse of wind scudded ripples along the skin of its water as it trickled upstream. As they approached its quiet, burbling sound, Mare took off ahead of Iris, leaping from the grass to bounce from rock to rock alongside the creek. Iris yelled for her to be careful, not to go so fast, but really, she was delighted to see her at all enthusiastic in their brief time together. A moment later, Mare paused atop a stone in the mud, and finally, Iris was able to catch up to her. When she did, Mare pointed to the ground, a quizzical glance now slanted across her face. “What’s that?” Mare asked.

Lodged into the mud where Mare pointed was the decaying body of a snapping turtle. By Iris’s estimation it’d been dead a few days at least, its head and limbs gone a murky black, flapped limp against the ground. Its shell still held a speckle of yellow and brown, except there were cracks webbed across it now, and in those new apertures were spots of red, meat and tissue. Up close, Iris caught a whiff of its scent—the stench of death, like that of scallions brined in sweat. The bitterness of it repulsed her, made her almost retch, and she went to tug Mare away, as far away as they could walk.

But Mare shrugged her off the moment their skin made contact. “It’s dead,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

Iris paused to choose her words; she knew to be careful, that Anna wouldn’t like them discussing a topic so sensitive as this. She surveyed the turtle once more—a colony of ants marched single-file over its back, trailed into the nearby grass, and disappeared there. “Yes,” she said. “It’s dead.”

“Do you think it hurt? When it died?”

In the long course of her lifetime, Iris had learned that, yes, most things feel bad, that each moment of relief you could navigate into life was a mercy. She couldn’t fathom that death might be any different, but it seemed to her sordid to reveal all this to Mare. “It looks peaceful now,” she said.

“We have to bury it,” Mare said. “Like we did for grandpa.”

Heat cropped up behind Iris’s eyes, so that she had to bite her lip to stave off tears. Her husband, her Trevor, was given a quiet funeral a couple years back—only immediate family and a scatter of townsfolk close enough to call friends. It pained her to think that Mare, still so young, might recall that day as vividly as she did herself.

“Honey, turtles don’t get funerals.”

“But it’s dead. We can’t just leave it behind.”

Iris sighed. Again she cast her gaze upward: the sky had paled to some varnished peach color, clouds still thick with the promise of rain. “What if instead of burying it,” she said, “we set it to rest in the water?”

Mare kept her eyes on the turtle’s corpse and nodded. A moment later, she kneeled down and sank her fingers beneath either side of the animal’s shell. As she pried it loose, mud stained her little white fingers red up to the knuckle; Iris couldn’t wait to scrub them with creek water as soon as they were done. When Mare finally wriggled the turtle loose, she raised it to her chest and stepped off the rock to stand beside Iris. As they approached the creek bank, the turtle’s head and limbs sagged downward, flimsy enough Iris was sure they’d detach and sprinkle to the mud one by one.

Mare crouched by the water, her rear hovering only a few inches from the ground. Iris’s knees were shot such that she couldn’t replicate her granddaughter’s posture, so instead she stood behind her. She was eager to put this moment behind them, to move forward with their day and make the most of it. They had so little time left together. Behind them, those same children still screamed from the park, in delight, or fear, Iris couldn’t tell which. It was the gentle motion of the creek she tried to focus on, as Mare reached her hands as far over the water as they could go. She paused for a moment, her hands shaky in their reach, and then straightened her fingers off the turtle so that it plunged beneath the water with a splash. A few bubbles glugged up from underneath as its body spun under the surface. Though it still looked dead as ever, its head bobbed back and forth on its descent, until pretty soon it got so lost in the turbid black depths Iris couldn’t spot it at all.

“There,” she said. “Now do you feel better?”

But Mare didn’t answer at first; when she did a moment later, it wasn’t with words but with a sob. She stood from the ground and wailed in Iris’s shadow, burying her face in her muddy hands before Iris could stop her. Iris winced as the rust-red goop spread across her granddaughter’s cheeks and eyelids, forgetting herself for a moment so that it was too long before she pulled Mare close to her. She tucked the girl’s face into her shirt, shushed her, and palmed the length of her hair, but all this did nothing to quiet her. The girl’s cries floated above them and spread out in all directions. The kids from the other side of the park paused by the big silver slide, to stand and gaze at her and Mare.

Between sobs Mare explained that she hadn’t wanted the turtle to sink, and had wanted instead for it to get caught up on the stream and swept away up the water. Why, she pleaded, did it have to sink like that? What Iris wouldn’t have given for an easy answer to this, for some repair for the girl’s pain at this moment. But she had nothing. Mare’s cries persisted for many minutes, loud even once they began dwindling against the cotton of Iris’s shirt. And all the while Iris held her, unable to offer her granddaughter the words she so wished she had.

It was as Mare quieted that the sky decided to finally open up. It wasn’t much rain, only a drizzle, but enough for Iris to curse it immediately in her mind—she would have to rush Mare home for now. Her knees flared with pain as she crouched to face Mare at eye level. Mud remained on Mare’s face, though it streaked down her cheeks now, set to run by tears and rain.

“I know you’re upset,” Iris said, her hands on Mare’s shoulders. “I am too. But we can’t stand here in the rain all day.”

Mare sniffled and nodded, but only collapsed herself once more against Iris’s chest. What Iris wanted most was respite from the rain, but it was too late anyhow. Their clothes were drenched by now, their day ruined. Over Mare’s shoulder, she spotted the road to Anna’s house beyond the park. Rain bounced against the pavement, cars whooshing past with their frantic windshield wipers. She tried to reason with Mare, but she just kept crying, the two of them stalled in the rain by the creek. As the rain continued to soak them, Iris felt heat gather in her fingertips—the kind of slow-burning anger she used to feel when Anna was a child. But she only held the girl tighter, to resist all that. She could see no way to calm the girl—certainly, she couldn’t pick her up and carry her home—and her lungs heaved with the want of a cigarette.

Iris pulled Mare from her chest and fixated on her crinkled-up, mud-blotched face. “Listen,” she said. “We have to get you home, Mare. You hear me? You run off ahead of me—I’ll catch up to you.”

Too fast, Iris thought, Mare took off. She ran out and away from her, leaving Iris to play catch-up behind her till her breathing became clipped and wheezy. She did her best to keep up, but she could maintain a jogger’s pace at best, and it only slowed her down when she had to call after Mare to stay out of the road. Mare hardly seemed to mind her, though, so lost up ahead had she made herself. When she was two lawns away, she saw Mare cross into Anna’s yard, and it was then that dread set in. She knew how it would look arriving at Anna’s house behind this rain-soaked child, later than expected, and with mud still caked under her fingernails. She knew that no explanation would appease Anna. What she didn’t know was that the moment Mare leaped onto the stoop and banged on the front door, Anna would be there to scoop her daughter up in shock. She didn’t know that the moment Mare was in her mother’s arms she would fill her in on every detail of their day: the lousy parade, the unplanned excursion to the park, the sunk turtle, everything. She didn’t know that when Anna would finally turn to her, it would be with resignation instead of scorn. She didn’t know that when she waved to her from the welcome mat, Mare wouldn’t have the chance to say goodbye before Anna closed the door between them.

No—as she jogged behind Mare under the rain toward her daughter’s house, Iris didn’t know how it would feel to be left alone on the doorstep like that, wondering when she might gain access to her granddaughter’s life once again. She didn’t know the most painful thing of all would be how typical all that sadness would feel, how routine. And she didn’t know that after—as she would make her way down the open road toward home—she would turn for one last look at Anna’s house, certain she was leaving something behind on the other side of that door. Something she used to think of as her life.

Em Williamson is a queer nonbinary writer from Mississippi and Kentucky. These days, they live in Chicago with their partner. Their fiction has appeared in journals such as Puerto del Sol, storySouth, Typehouse Magazine, and numerous others. They are currently a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where they are at work on a novel.