Nora Esme Wagner
Mud Pies
The pies are full of twigs and leaves and dirt so dark it looks dredged up from the center of the earth. Pale, silvery shapes squirm inside, so when you hold a pie, it feels like a swamp creature is in your hands. These are the worms. The best around, the pride of the Campell girls. You couldn’t find tastier worms if you flipped over every rock in the playground, sifted through all the piles of damp woodchips. It takes an experienced eye. A knowing tongue.
“Are you gonna try?” the youngest Campbell asks. Of the three sisters, she looks the least threadbare. Baby fat still pads her cheeks, but in a thin, vanishing layer, like slowly collapsing coffee foam.
“I’m not sure,” Tammy says.
“I can hear your belly grumble,” the middle Campbell says. “You’re hungry.”
Tammy thinks back to the bento-box lunch she brought to school in her backpack. A thermos of chicken and dumplings, a heap of cornbread, spears of okra, a clementine peeled clean of its white strings. Her mom always packs extra in the event that she ever makes a friend. Yet the lunchbox always returns fully eaten, only an orange shell left, and teachers still report that Tammy is a recluse. Not bullied. Ignored, which her mom finds, in a way, worse.
“My mom won’t like it if I don’t eat what she packed me.”
“Your mama still packs you lunch?” says the oldest Campbell, who rarely ever speaks. No one knows her age, and rumors have flown that she’s so quiet because her tongue was bitten off by a grown-up boyfriend. But Tammy sees the tongue dance in her mouth, a slip of gray-pink.
“Your mom doesn’t?”
The Campbells paw the ground like skittish horses. The youngest seems upset, the oldest ready to throw a punch. The middle crosses her arms over her chest and says, “C’mon. Let’s not waste our good worms on her.”
They snatch the mud pie out of Tammy’s hands, where it leaves smears of dirt that look like brownie crumbs. A sheen of worm-slime lingers. Guarding the mud pie, the Campbells sneer and turn their backs. Leaving her at the forested edge of the playground, alone. She wonders why they’d slipped her a note in the first place. What expectation she’d disappointed.
“Wait.”
All three Campbells pause.
“My mom’s making a pie tonight. A real one, with apples. You should come over.”
The oldest looks back at Tammy, tilts her head. She licks a dirty finger absentmindedly, as though she were only wetting a thumb to flip a page in class. “We gotta think about that.”
Tammy nods quickly, opening her mouth to say more. That the apples are fresh from the grove, the deepest red she’s ever seen. That her mom never skimps on the lard for the crust. That the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg and roasting fruit steeps the whole house.
But the Campbells keep walking. Off to eat their lunch.
Tammy isn’t anticipating the knock. Dinner’s been eaten already—the hamburger steak and gravy cleared from the plates, the silverware arranged in the dishwasher according to her mom’s neat system. The pie’s now baking, leaking sweet odors into the living room where Tammy’s watching television. She jumps at the sound of a fist against the door.
“Are we expecting someone?” her mom asks.
“I invited some friends over for pie.”
“Friends?”
“Some classmates.”
“Well!”
She hurries to the front door as if it were the oven’s and her pie was about to burn. The Campbells are waiting on the porch, still wearing their school clothes and carrying their school bags. Dirt freckles across their noses.
“Please come in! The pie’s almost ready.”
They stumble in slowly, like there’s an invisible membrane impeding their entrance. Their eyes swivel around the kitchen. The booming rack of pots and pans. The grade reports tacked onto the fridge. The soapstone countertop, balancing a bowl of just-ripe bananas.
“Hi,” Tammy says shyly.
They sit around the table, three Campbells on one side, Tammy alone on the other. Conversation moves through her mom, who asks their names, their parents’, the teachers they like best, the church they attend. Her eyes rest on their muddy faces, the wrist bones prodding out of skin, but she says nothing. Feral Campbells for friends are better than no friends at all.
When the pie’s finally ready, she serves them mountainous slices on her second-best set of china. The Campbells fork apart the pie, like they’re monkeys grooming bugs from fur. Tammy’s halfway done with her piece by the time they take a first bite.
The youngest makes a face. The middle spits it into a napkin. The oldest starts coughing.
“Gosh, what’s the matter? Have you never had pie before?”
“It’s a little sweet, ma’am,” the oldest says finally.
“I didn’t add any more sugar than usual. Do you think it’s too sweet, Tammy?”
Tammy says no through a heaping forkful. It comes out as nargh.
After their disastrous first taste, the Campbells go silent, mushing the pie around their plates, taking no further bites. Tammy’s mom sighs and mutters to herself. A second helping for Tammy. Then a third.
Once a deep dent has been made in the pie, Tammy’s mom rises and asks if the Campbells need a ride home.
“We’re all good, ma’am,” the middle says. Despite the too-sweet pie, they seem reluctant to leave, hovering near the hot breath of the oven. Tammy, too, is worried. That it’s all been a gotcha for not eating their mud pie. That tomorrow will be just like always, and no one will speak to her.
She follows them onto the porch, where stars gooseflesh across the sky. The Campbells rub at their dirty noses, seeming sad, as if they also wished they’d liked the apple pie. But girls who grow up on dirt will choke on sugar.
“Lookie here,” the youngest says, pointing at the railing. A shiny worm inches along, blossom-pink, clean of any mud. She plucks it up and puts it in Tammy’s hands.
Tammy brings her palms to her mouth. The Campbells stare hungrily. She kisses its clammy head, then opens wide.
Nora Esme Wagner is a junior at Wellesley College. She lives in San Francisco, California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Smokelong, Wigleaf, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. Her stories have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is an assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel and the Co-Editor-in-Chief for The Wellesley Review.
